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IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


“INDIAN” STORIES 
WITH HISTORICAL BASES 

By D. LANGE 

12mo Cloth Illustrated 
Price per volume, $1.26 net 

ON THE TRAIL OF THE SIOUX 

THE SILVER ISLAND OF THE 
CHIPPEWA 

LOST IN THE FUR COUNTRY 
IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 
THE LURE OF THE BLACK HILLS 

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON 




“Bad lake/' said Wahita, as he looked over the 'turbulent 
WAVES IN THE MORNiNo/’ — Page 104. 






IN THE 

GREAT WILD NORTH 


D-^LANGE 


W 


AUTHOR OF “ON THE TRAIL OF THE SIOUX,” “THE SILVER 
ISLAND OF THE CHIPPEWA,” AND “LOST IN 
THE FUR country” 


ILLUSTRATED BY W. L. HOWES 



BOSTON 

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. 



Copyright, 1915, By 
D. LANGE 
Published, October, 1915 
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London 

IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 





• 4 * ♦ 


‘WorwooC) B>ac00 

BERWICK & SMITH Ca 

NORWOOD, MASS, 

U S. A- 


PEEFACE 


This book, like its three predecessors, con- 
tains a picture from a certain period of 
American life and history. The story begins 
at the close of our second war with England. 

The events of the first part of the tale oc- 
cur at the old and well-known trading-post 
of York Factory on Hudson Bay. 

For the second part, the scene shifts to 
Fort Douglas, near the junction of the Assin- 
iboin and Eed Rivers, where the Selkirk 
settlers made the first attempt to convert the 
butfalo-plains into wheat-fields. Out of this 
lonely and adventurous Selkirk settlement 
have grown the great city of Winnipeg and 
the agricultural empire of Western Canada. 

The third shift of scenery takes the reader 
over the great northern butfalo-range from 
Fort Douglas and historic Pembina to the 
foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. 

The fourth and last part of the story gives 
a glimpse of life in the great beaver country 
of the foot hills, where the great expedition 


vi 


PEEFACE 


of Lewis and Clark, some ten years previous, 
had shown a wealth of fur. 

I have taken pains to he accurate on all 
points of both natural and political history, 
locality, manners, and customs. The story 
itself and its characters, I prefer to leave to 
my readers without any introduction. 

Perhaps some who read these pages may 
be able to travel in a white man’s canoe over 
at least a part of the route which Steve Mc- 
Lean and his father followed under the guid- 
ance of old Wahita, the Cree Indian. 

The Great Wild North has changed but 
little in a century. Nor has the West lost 
its charm and romance. To travel on horse- 
back over the plains and foothills is as fas- 
cinating to-day as it was in the time of our 
story. 

D. Lange. 

St. Paul, Minnesota. 

August, 1915. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Aground in Five-fathom Hole . . . 1 

II. In the Fort on Hudson Bay ... 11 

III. Camp Hunters 26 

IV. Christmas at Hudson Bay .... 37 

V. A Cold Swim ,.56 

VI. The Going op the River 64 

VII. The Last Great Hunt on the Marsh . 73 

VIII. The Great Canoe Trip with Wahita . 83 

IX. A Hard Stretch 93 

X. On the Lake of the Big Winds . . 100 

XL To the End of the Big Lake . . . 117 

XIL In the War Zone 126 

XIII. With the Crees and by Themselves . 136 

XIV. Alone in the Forest 148 

XV. A Winter in Tepee and Dugout . . . 167 

XVI. In the House op the Beaver People . 190 

XVII. Wahita in Trouble 203 

XVIII. The Great Buffalo Hunt .... 209 

XIX. The Hunter’s Paradise 218 

XX. The Camp Near the Rim Rock . . . 227 

XXI. Catching the King op the Air . . . 236 

XXII. Getting Homesick 247 

XXIII. Stalked by a Panther 257 

XXIV. The Last Journey and the Longest . 268 

vii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 


‘^Bad lake/^ said Wahita, as he looked over the 
turbulent waves in the morning {Page 
104) . ......... Frontispiece 

rACINQ 

PAGE 

‘^There comes a small schooner to take us ashore’^ . 8 

“Now come, boy!” he cried 60 

“Come oot, laddie, come oot!” 194 

Each man dashed into ^he herd 212 


The eagle was firmly grasped by one foot . . . 250 


1 


IN THE GREAT WILD 
NORTH 

CHAPTER I 

AGROUND IN FIVE-FATHOM HOLE 

T he Hudson Bay Company's ship, 
Prince Rupert, had once more safely 
made its dangerous annual passage 
from England to York Factory, and, in the 
middle of the afternoon of August tenth, 
1815, the captain dropped anchor in Five- 
Fathom Hole olf the mouth of Hayes Eiver. 
On account of the low shores and shallow 
water the big ship could not go closer to 
land, where the ‘‘ship’s beacon” and the low 
wooden buildings of York Factory were 
plainly visible seven miles away on the banks 
of Hayes Eiver. 

The Prince Rupert carried not only the 
1 


2 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


goods and provisions for the numerous iso- 
lated posts of the great fur company, but it 
also had brought about twenty-five passengers 
for that romantic and adventurous enterprise 
known as the Red River Settlement. For 
two months the ship had tacked back and 
forth against contrary winds, had rolled and 
bounced on the white-crested waves of the 
Atlantic, had then beaten her way through the 
ice floes and had dodged the great glistening 
icebergs of Davis Strait; and now, at last, 
she was safely anchored in sight of the low 
shores of Hudson Bay that stretched out to 
east and west like endless, dark-green flats as 
far as the eye could see. 

Of all the passengers on hoard, none were 
more anxious to set foot on dry land than 
little Steve McLean and his father, for they 
had not only made the long voyage from Lon- 
don to York Factory, but they had also within 
six months made an equally long sea voyage 
from New York to Scotland. 

When, about a year before, little Steve’s 
mother had died in New York, David McLean, 


AGROUND IN FIVE-FATHOM HOLE 3 


Steve’s father, had grown lonesome and 
homesick in America and had decided to go 
back to his native parish of Kildonan in the 
highlands of northern Scotland. But, when 
he finally arrived after a most tedious jour- 
ney of nearly three months, he was a very 
much disappointed man. The little cottage 
of his father had disappeared, and on the 
hillside, where he used to help his father har- 
vest the scanty crop of oats, barley, and 
potatoes, a flock of dull sheep were grazing. 

During the previous ten years many Scotch 
and English cotters had been forced to leave 
their homes and small farms, for the land- 
lords had found that it was more profitable to 
convert their large holdings into sheep pas- 
tures than to rent them to small tenant cot- 
ters. 

David McLean discovered that his few re- 
maining boyhood friends had almost forgot- 
ten him. It was difficult to make them under- 
stand the stories he told about New York, and 
he felt that many of them thought he was a 
lying braggart. Most of the lads with whom 


4 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


he had attended the old kirk at Kildonan, 
with whom he had roamed the hills and 
fought his boyhood battles, were scattered to 
the ends of the earth; a large number, in- 
cluding his best friend, George McGolrick, 
had gone with Lord Selkirk’s people to Red 
River in America. 

For a few days David McLean and Steve 
wandered about as if lost, and the more 
David saw, the more homesick he grew for 
America. On the first Sunday evening as he 
and Steve sat alone in the tavern he had al- 
most made up his mind what to do. 

“What think ’ee lad?” he asked, “’boot 
going back to America? What think ’ee of 
going to Red River? They say the land is 
right gude, and plenty of it, and no rocks like 
here in Scotland. To be sure, there be In- 
dians, and buffaloes and wolves, but methinks 
they will nae eat a Scotchman.” 

At the sounds of Indians, butfaloes and 
wolves, Steve, who had been almost asleep, 
became quickly wide awake. 

“Yes, Father,” he replied quickly, “let’s. 


AGROUND IN FIVE-FATHOM HOLE 5 


go! There nothing in this country but 
sheep and hills and rocks. The Indians and 
buffaloes will nae eat Scotchmen.’^ 

The truth is that Steve, although he had not 
dared to say so, had grown much disgusted 
with the country about which his father had 
told him such wonderful stories. 

In those days most of the people around 
Kildonan still spoke the Gaelic language or 
Highland Scotch, of which Steve knew only a 
few words. When his father talked about 
America to the guests in the tavern, Steve 
sat in a corner by himself. The lads of 
his own age often came and stared at him and 
made fun of him in words Steve could not un- 
derstand. When he tried to talk to them they 
mocked him and laughed at his broken Gaelic. 
He had already had several fights in the court 
of the tavern, but now his father had forbid- 
den him to fight any more, and the only way 
he could avoid fighting was by going about 
with his father or staying indoors. If he 
went out by himself, some large boy was 
pretty sure to come along with a lad of 


6 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOKTH 


Steve’s size who would make faces and fists 
at him and say something in Gaelic which 
Steve knew meant : ^ ^ I can lick thee, Yankee 
brat!” 

So Steve’s impressions of Scotland had not 
been happy, and when he heard the words: 
America, Eed Eiver, Indians, buffaloes, 
wolves, his imagination was ablaze and he 
was ready to go. 

He had quite often seen Indians in New 
York and had often watched the bales of buf- 
falo, wolf, beaver, and other skins hoisted on 
board the ships bound for Europe. It would 
be great if he could see all these animals alive 
and if he could also see Indians who still went 
on the war-path and rode wild ponies. A few 
straggling Indians occasionally traded in the 
stores of New York and squatted silently on 
the sidewalks. 

At last he once more saw America, and 
visions of real boy life sprang up in his active 
brain, for he had spent the first five years of 
his life in a small town in Connecticut and 
the last five or six years he had lived in New 


AGROUND IN FIVE-FATHOM HOLE 7 


York City, where his father had been in the 
employ of John Jacob Astor, the great Ameri- 
can fur merchant. In those days New York 
was a town of sixty thousand people, and 
still a good place for a hoy to live in. 

As he gazed toward the low shore which 
gradually closed in from the north and 
northeast, he was struck by its desolate, tree- 
less appearance. 

‘‘Father,’^ he asked, ^‘what has become of 
all the trees'? Have they cut them all for 
firewood? You remember the big woods 
across the East River where you showed me 
the fat gray squirrel crawling into a knot- 
hole?^’ 

David remembered it well. ‘‘I reckon, 
lad,” he replied, ‘‘this coast is too far north; 
trees don’t grow here, and we’ll find no gray 
squirrels. ’ ’ 

But now something moving attracted their 
attention. 

“Look ’ee there, lad!” exclaimed David, 
“there comes a small schooner under full sail 
to take us ashore.’^ 


8 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


The schooner approached rapidly under a 
stern wind. In about half an hour they could 
make out through a glass the name, Silver 
Fox, painted on the bow. 

Father and son and ten Selkirk passengers 
were ordered to descend the ladder as soon 
as the Silver Fox lay alongside the Prince 
Rupert, and the schooner began to tack to- 
ward the mouth of Hayes River. Its prog- 
ress, however, was much too slow for the lad 
who was impatient to be once more in Amer- 
ica, even if it was to be on the bleak shore of 
Hudson Bay. 

But disappointment was in store for him. 
Behind the vast expanse of sea and flat shore 
to the northwest the sunset red faded into 
orange and then into blue, and as the stars 
were coming out the Silver Fox began to drift 
back toward the ship, with a strong outgoing 
tide. 

‘‘Let go the anchor the captain called 
out. “Can’t make it to-night. Headwind 
and tide are too much for her.” 

Here they were, half-way between the ship 



“There comes a small schooner to take us ashore.” — Page 7. 











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AGROUND IN FIVE-FATHOM HOLE 9 


and the land, anchored for the night in shal- 
low water. 

Very soon it grew too chilly on deck, and 
Steve and his father went below into the little 
cabin. Steve thought it was the smallest 
room he had ever seen. Seven or eight peo- 
ple were already there, some sitting on small 
stools and two men on a trunk. There was a 
bed against the wall, but nobody wanted to 
lie down on it, although all were equally tired. 
Steve squatted on a small box and David 
found a stool to sit on. A fish-oil lamp cast 
a weird light on the tired men and women and 
soon every one was silent. 

Bump ! went Steve ’s head against the wall. 
There was some little laughing when the boy 
quickly righted himself with a startled look 
in his deep blue eyes. 

^‘Get thee doon on the bed!’’ a motherly 
woman urged him. “Lay thee doon, thee is 
sore sleepy.” 

“No, I’m awake, I’m awake,” Steve pro- 
tested. “I’ll sit up.” 

For ten or fifteen minutes he did sit up, 


10 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


then he tumbled clean over on the floor. By 
this time all the grown people were too sleepy 
even to laugh at the boy’s plight, and without 
saying a word David McLean picked up the 
tired-out lad and placed him on the bed. 

Toward early morning when the tide was 
lowest, the boat grounded and began to 
thump with the motion of the waves. Once 
the lad opened his eyes and looked about him, 
frightened and dazed, hut when he saw his 
father and the other people still seated in the 
dingy cabin he lay down and again fell sound 
asleep in spite of the rocking and thumping of 
the boat. 


CHAPTEE II 

IN THE POET ON HUDSON BAY 

BOUT daylight, when both wind and 



tide turned, the Silver Fox weighed 


anchor and stood in toward the 
mouth of Hayes River. David McLean 
gently shook his sleeping boy by the arm. 

^‘Wake up, laddie, wake up!’^ he spoke 
softly, ‘‘we’re going to land soon! Come, 
we’re almost there.” 

The boy sat up wild-eyed at the word 
“land,” took his father’s hand and the two 
climbed on deck by a short, narrow stairway. 

The passengers on deck were straining 
their eyes trying to distinguish the different 
factory buildings and the features of the 
landscape. The endless stretch of marsh, 
covered with tall rank grass and studded here 
and there with clumps of low arctic willows, 


11 


12 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


looked to their eyes wild and forbidding in- 
deed, and by contrast called up in their minds 
pictures of bonnie Scotch hills with fragrant 
slopes of purple heather and tufts of golden 
gorse. 

And now the schooner was made fast to the 
landing, where a strange-looking crowd 
awaited the newcomers. 

‘ ' Oh, Father, look at all the Indians ! ’ ’ were 
Steve’s first words after he had been breath- 
lessly watching the motley crowd. ‘‘Are 
they Indians that fight?” ’ 

But so many things attracted the attention 
of the responsive lad that he was off amongst 
the crowd before his father had time to an- 
swer. 

Here were sure-enough real Indians. 
They were mostly clothed in white, red, or 
green blankets held to the body by a red belt. 
Leggins of cloth or caribou skin covered their 
legs below the knee. All wore moccasins, 
but not one of them wore either hat or cap. 

Then there were quite a number of men who 
looked and were dressed almost like Indians. 


IN THE FORT ON HUDSON BAY 13 


They were the boatmen, mostly French half- 
breeds who once a year made the long, dan- 
gerous journey from one Hudson Bay post to 
another. Many of them had come from Jack 
River or Norway House just north of Lake 
Winnipeg, but some had come with furs as 
far as Red River, and all would start back 
as soon as they had received the goods and 
provisions for their different posts, scattered 
over half of Canada, a region as large as half 
of Europe. 

The number of white men was also quite 
large. The governor was there and the doc- 
tor, besides accountants, clerks, and appren- 
tices, and quite a number of workmen and 
servants. 

But at no port had Steve ever seen so many 
dogs. Strange-looking dogs they were, too. 
Grayish or whitish in color, with big bushy 
tails and a savage, wolfish look. Steve won- 
dered whether the Indians and half-breeds 
kept sheep, for he remembered that every 
shepherd in Scotland had a dog; however, 
these animals looked more like big fierce 


14 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


wolves than like sheep dogs. Curious, too, 
was the freight piled up on the wooden plat- 
form. There were bales and bales and more 
hales of fur, nothing but fur : beaver, marten, 
fisher, lynx, bear, wolf, fox, muskrat, otter, 
buffalo, black bear, brown bear, and grizzly 
bear. Some of the skins, like those of the 
buffaloes and grizzlies, had been carried in 
canoes and on the backs of the voyageurs 
more than a thousand miles. Now all were 
ready for shipment to the great fur markets 
of Europe, to London, Paris, and Leipsic ; for 
York Factory was the great shipping-point of 
the Hudson Bay Company. 

The Hudson Bay Company, which began in 
London, England, as a Company of Gentle- 
men Adventurers, away back about 1670, had 
already grown to be the greatest fur company 
in the world, but at this time a powerful rival 
had grown up in Canada, at Montreal, the 
Northwest Company. 

Could the Selkirk settlers who in high 
hopes made the long journey to Red River 
have known what hardships and suffering 


IN THE FORT ON HUDSON BAY 15 


the rivalry of those two great companies 
would bring them, they never would have left 
the sterile hills of Scotland for the rich black 
soil of Red River. 

The Northwest Company has disappeared, 
having been absorbed by its rival, but the 
Hudson Bay Company still buys the furs 
from the Indians scattered over the whole of 
Canada, and with the gentle, but firm hand of 
commerce, as it has done for two hundred 
years, it still feeds and clothes and rules 
Cree and Chippewa and all the scattered 
tribes who will roam the northern woods and 
lakes and marshes as long as there are any 
woods and marshes left. And one who 
would feel the romance and the power and 
the reach of the great company should visit 
the two great trade emporiums of the H. B. 
C. at Winnipeg, which now stand on the very 
ground where a hundred years ago Nor’- 
westers and H. B. C. people fought their bat- 
tles, where Scotch and Swiss farmers, French 
half-breeds and Indian butfalo-hunters, re- 
tired Hudson Bay factors and discharged 


16 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


British soldiers lived and mingled in as mot- 
ley a crowd as the world has ever seen. 

The Hudson Bay Company still is a great 
fur-trading company, but it is also one of the 
greatest importing, jobbing, and mercantile 
companies, and everybody in Canada knows 
what H. B. C. stands for. 

At the time of our story it was not only 
the greatest fur-trading company of the 
world, but it was also the greatest landowner 
in the world. In its charter of 1670 King 
Charles II granted to this ‘‘Company of 
Gentlemen Adventurers’’ in fee simple more 
than half the present Dominion of Canada. 
In this vast region, long known as Rupert’s 
Land, the company owned all the land and 
was the government. It was not until 1871 
that the company sold its title to the land and 
its sovereignty to the Dominion of Canada. 

But in 1812, Lord Selkirk had bought of 
the company which was in financial difficul- 
ties on account of interruptions to the fur 
trade caused by the Napoleonic war, 110,000 


IN THE FOET ON HUDSON BAY 17 


square miles of land for the now famous Eed 
Kiver settlement, and hardy and tenacious 
Scotchmen, Orkneymen, and Swiss became 
the pioneer settlers of the great agricultural 
empire of Western Canada. 

So much was there to be seen at York Fac- 
tory after the arrival of the Silver Fox that 
Steve hardly found time to eat. 

The great time for the Indians to come to 
York Factory and the other factories in 
Canada was the month of June, but enough 
Indians were even now encamped near the 
fort to make the life at the post very interest- 
ing. Besides the Indians, there were a great 
many rivermen or boatmen. A large fleet 
of boats had come from Norway House and 
there were smaller ones from Oxford House, 
from the Saskatchewan, and other distant 
forts. 

Within a few days the Silver Fox had un- 
loaded a great cargo of blankets, cotton cloth, 
axes, knives, beads, tobacco, needles, awls, 
kettles, guns, powder, lead, and all kinds of 
provisions for the trade and the needs of a 


18 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


hundred distant posts scattered all over Can- 
ada. 

As the small schooners went hack and forth 
between the wharf at the factory and the 
Prince Rupert, anchored at Five-Fathom 
Hole, they took out with them valuable loads 
of furs, and on the sixth day the Prince Ru- 
pert sailed away with a cargo of fur valued at 
two hundred thousand dollars at Hudson 
Bay, but worth a million dollars in the Lon- 
don market. 

Within a few more days all the river bri- 
gades had left, and the Selkirk settlers had 
started in flatbbats and North Country 
wooden canoes for their destination on Red 
River, where untold and unexpected hard- 
ships awaited them; and once more York Fac- 
tory settled down to a year of quiet life which 
would not be broken until next June, when 
the Indians would return to the fort with 
their winter’s catch of fur, and when, a little 
later, fleets of the company’s boats would 
again come down the river with their cargoes 


IN THE FORT ON HUDSON BAY 19 


of furs, and the ship from London would 
make its annual call. 

Steve and his father did not go with the 
boats and the settlers to Red River. The 
governor had offered to David McLean the 
position of trader at the fort and David had 
accepted it. He was glad of the opportunity 
to increase his small capital which had sadly 
diminished on the long trip from New York to 
Scotland and back to America. He had also 
learned from the clerks at the fort that food 
was scarce at Red River and that trouble was 
brewing between the traders and men of the 
Northwest Company and those of the Hud- 
son Bay Company, for the Northwesters 
feared that a settlement of farmers at Red 
River on lands of the Hudson Bay Company, 
and under its control, would hurt or even 
ruin the fur business of the Northwest Com- 
pany. For these reasons David McLean, ex- 
perienced in frontier life, had concluded not 
to go to Red River before he had earned a 
year’s credit with the company, which he 


20 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


might use the following year in the store 
maintained by the company at Fort Douglas 
on Red River. 

During the next week Steve spent almost 
as much time in the trading-house as his 
father. 

David McLean did not understand the lan- 
guage of the Swampy Crees, the Indians who 
traded at York Factory, but he had bought 
furs of the Indians in New York State, and an 
Indian trader does not need a large vocabu- 
lary ; he needs to have a supply of goods, and 
needs to know fur and Indians. McLean 
knew furs, he knew Indians, and he had more 
goods on the plain wooden shelves and in 
boxes, barrels, and bags than the whole Cree 
nation could buy in two years. 

Trading in a Hudson Bay store was very 
ditferent from trading in a modern city de- 
partment store. 

About nine in the morning, when David and 
Steve opened their shop, several Crees were 
already waiting. In came the first one with 
his packs of fur. David at once began to sort 


IN THE FOET ON HUDSON BAY 21 


the skins according to quality and kind, and 
Steve helped till he was tired. 

‘‘You have made two hundred beavers,” 
said David; “pretty good catch.” 

“Yes, good catch,” assented Ageemik, 
“good catch! Hunted alone. Beaver great 
plenty. Fox hark much, marten sneak 
around, get caught plenty.” 

Ageemik, like many Crees near York Fac- 
tory, spoke and understood considerable Eng- 
lish, at least he knew the “fur talk” and 
“food talk” quite well, and most talk between 
Whites and Indians in the Great Wild North 
is fur talk and food talk even to this day. 

Steve counted out two hundred wooden 
tags, his father recounted them and handed 
them to Ageemik, who tied them in a dirty 
blue handkerchief. 

It was now time for Ageemik to begin his 
part of the trade. Very leisurely he looked 
at blankets, capotes, guns, traps, and cotton 
prints. When Steve had almost grown tired 
watching, Ageemik said, “ Blanket.” 

“Ten,” said David, and Ageemik returned 


22 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


ten of the wooden tags. Next the Indian 
selected a gun, for which David demanded 
and received twenty tags. 

Within two hours Ageemik had returned all 
his tags and was fifty tags in debt to the com- 
pany, and in a corner he had quite a pile of 
goods. Two blankets, two shirts, twenty 
yards of cotton print, a red sash, thread, 
heads, handkerchiefs, awls, knives, needles, 
ten pounds of black tea, tobacco, traps, knives, 
fishhooks, lines, and other small articles, be- 
sides bullets, shot, powder, hatchets, and a 
violin. 

“Squaw will be glad,” he grunted; “wants 
new dress for Christmas dance. Little girl 
wants beads, make fine moccasins. Boy Joe 
is crazy, wants music box with strings on. 
Frenchman Baptiste, he say he teach him play 
crazy dance music like white man.” 

There was no hurry in all this trading, and 
it was almost noon when Ageemik had sold 
all the fur he had caught in a year and was 
once more happily in debt to the company. 

The other Indians patiently waited their 


IN THE FOET ON HUDSON BAY 23 


turn. From twelve to two David locked the 
shop, and the Indians again waited. They 
rather enjoyed prolonging their stay at the 
factory. It was the great annual event in 
their lives, as good as Christmas, a circus, a 
big wedding, and Thanksgiving all combined 
to a country boy. 

As for competition of other stores, there 
was none nearer than two hundred miles, and 
that belonged to the Hudson Bay Company. 

Ageemik did not haggle about prices; he 
knew the company had just one price on all 
its goods. He was not suspicious about the 
quality, for he knew and could see that the 
articles were just as good as they were last 
year and the year before, just as good as 
they were when he first came to York Factory 
with his father. He knew the company never 
cheated its customers ; that was as impossible 
and unthinkable as it would he for wild geese 
to return to Hudson Bay on Christmas Day. 

Ageemik did, however, expect a present 
when he was through trading. 

David McLean produced a roll of tobacco 


24 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


twist and a powder-flask for Ageemik, a red 
shawl for his squaw, a jackknife and a pack- 
age of violin strings for the crazy boy, Joe, 
and a piece of red and white cotton print for 
the papoose. Ageemik would have liked to 
receive a small keg of rum, but the company 
did not give or sell spirits to the Indians ex- 
cept where they had to compete with the un- 
regulated American traders. 

Ageemik was well pleased with his trade, 
and as well pleased were McLean and the 
chief factor. Ageemik always brought in a 
good load of fine fur, most of it of prime 
quality and none caught out of season, and he 
never went deeply into debt with the com- 
pany. 

In the London market Ageemik ’s load of 
furs would bring between $1200 and $1500, 
but more than a year would pass before it 
could reach that market, and another year 
might pass before the company would sell 
and ship the same furs to Paris or Leipsic. 

Ageemik had never seen money, and would 
have had no use for it, for no gold or silver 


IN THE FORT ON HUDSON BAY 25 


money was used in the Indian trade. The 
beaver skin took the place of money, and all 
values and all accounts were reckoned in 
‘^beavers.’’ 

In this way all the Indians traded over 
the whole of EuperUs Land. The company 
set one price for furs and asked one price 
for its goods. A very good customer or an in- 
fluential chief might receive a more valuable 
present, but prices of furs and goods were the 
same to him as to the small Indian boy who 
brought in half a dozen muskrat skins. 


CHAPTEK III 


CAMP HUNTERS 

B oth Steve and his father were a good 
deal surprised to find that some of 
the August days of Hudson Bay were 
as hot as the summer days in New York. 

Even the pests of civilization were not ab- 
sent. During the short summer of July and 
August, even in that high latitude, swarms of 
mosquitoes, house-flies, cattle-flies and big 
buzzing horse-flies, or bulldogs, make life in 
any unscreened room a misery for a white 
man. The Indians are somewhat used to 
these pests, but it must be remembered that 
they always make their summer camps in 
spots away from swamps, on rocky points ex- 
posed to the breeze. Wherever from the 
Lake of the Woods to Hudson Bay the ca- 
noeist sees the tepee poles of the Indians, he 
may he sure of finding a good camping- 
ground. 


26 


CAMP HUNTEES 


27 


Toward the end of August the nights be- 
came cool and frosty, and after a few such 
nights mosquitoes and flies had disappeared 
and the really enjoyable season had begun at 
York Factory. The days were warm and 
still, a dreamy atmosphere lay over rivers, 
marsh, and hay, and sleeping under a thick 
cover of blankets was delightfully refreshing. 

On the marshes and in the woods the red 
cranberries and the yellow swamp-berries 
were ripe, and Steve gained much favor with 
the cook as well as with the men by gathering 
many a quart of them. The Indians had all 
left by this time, for they were getting ready 
to go to their winter hunting-grounds, and 
as there were no other white boys of Steve’s 
age at the fort, the lad was at times a little 
lonesome. 

At the beginning of September the ducks 
and geese began to fly about on Marsh Point, 
which is really a vast swamp, stretching into 
the bay between the mouths of Hayes and 
Nelson Eivers. 

During the last two weeks little had been 


28 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


seen of the wild ducks and geese, for at this 
time the old birds moult their big wing-feath- 
ers so rapidly that for about two weeks these 
great travelers of the air lose the power of 
flight. But now they began to show them- 
selves in the air in flocks of hundreds and 
thousands, and the great marsh was alive 
with the quacking of ducks, and the air with 
the honking of the big gray geese and the 
rarer cackling call of the white snow-geese, 
or wavies. 

Steve and his father now turned camp hunt- 
ers. During a few hours’ hunting in the 
morning they procured all the game they 
could carry home. The men in the mess-hall 
lived on finely flavored teal, pintails, wid- 
geons, and wild geese, while a large supply 
of the finest birds was put in the ice house 
or was smoked and dried for winter use. 

But the hunting of Steve and his father and 
other men made absolutely no impression on 
the number of geese and ducks. Every day 
the flocks grew larger, for they were gather- 
ing from east, west, and north, preparing to 


CAMP HUNTEES 


29 


begin their great autumn flight to the far-off 
marshes of Missouri, Arkansas, and the Gulf 
of Mexico. 

However, all seasons except winter pass 
quickly at Hudson Bay. By the beginning 
of October, ducks and geese had disappeared 
and marshes and pools were frozen over. 
Solid ice began to form along the banks of 
Hayes Eiver, and dark masses of slushy ice 
glided and swirled seaward in midstream. 
By the middle of October the river was frozen 
over solid. Low gray clouds drifted over the 
fort before a biting wind from the bay. They 
covered the pale brown grass with glistening 
snow crystals and sifted them gently through 
the dark green boughs of spruce and flr. And 
with the gray clouds and the north wind came, 
as if they had dropped out of the sky, flocks of 
beautiful fluffy white snowbirds that flitted 
fearlessly into the palisade of the fort and 
picked up the seeds of hay and grain where 
the draft-oxen of the company had been fed. 
With sweet soft chirps they called to each 
other as they flitted and whirled about from 


30 IN THE GKEAT WILD NORTH 


place to place, seeking their food in the seed- 
heads of dead grasses that still protruded 
from the snow. 

The long Hudson Bay winter had begun. 

The laborers were now hard at work cut- 
ting wood in the spruce thickets along the 
river, and the teamsters with their oxen 
hauled many and many a load into the pali- 
sade, for the iron stoves in the ditferent build- 
ings were kept red-hot, and ate up an immense 
amount of fuel, and the trees on Hayes River 
only grow to good cord-wood size. 

In the offices, the clerks were busy with 
their accounts and reports, for York Factory 
was the central depot and shipping-point for 
the whole Northern Department, including 
about fifty posts, many of which indeed were 
simply small outlying frontier posts with few 
men and little business, but others like Nor- 
way House and Red River did an immense 
amount of business and employed a large 
number of men. 

In the fur houses the packers and sorters 
were at work packing and appraising thou- 


CAMP HUNTERS 


31 


sands and thousands of pelts, from the heavy- 
shaggy butfalo skins of Saskatchewan to the 
small skins of weasel and muskrat. How- 
ever, nobody was hurried and pressed for 
time, because no new business would come 
in till the Indians returned in June, and the 
fur-packers even had till August to get ready 
for shipping the peltries in the four fur 
houses, for not till then could the annual Lon- 
don ship return to York Factory. 

The two men who were almost out of work 
were McLean, the trader, and old Sam Fer- 
guson, the postmaster. Only occasionally did 
an old neighborhood Indian straggle into the 
fort with a few furs, or one of the white men 
might wish to buy a little tobacco or a pair 
of moccasins. The postmaster had even less 
work. It had been a month since he had fin- 
ished sorting his letters and papers for Red 
River, for the Saskatchewan, for the distant 
posts on the Mackenzie River, on the Atha- 
basca, and in the country of the turbulent 
Blackfeet Indians. Some of this mail was 
already nearly a year old, and by the time the 


32 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


newspaper or the answer to an important let- 
ter reached the man for whom it was des- 
tined, another year would have to elapse. It 
took sometimes from three to four years be- 
fore the servants of the Hudson Bay Com- 
pany at the farthest posts could receive a re- 
ply from their friends in the United States, 
in Canada, or in England, Scotland, or the 
Orkney Islands. It was a wild and lonely 
life that these men had to lead. 

Steve and his father became more and more 
intimate companions. With Indian mocca- 
sins and on snowshoes they roamed far and 
wide over the marshes and through the woods 
of that wild North Country. Often they took 
their guns along and brought home a brace 
of ptarmigan, curious wild chickens, which are 
gray in summer but turn snow-white in win- 
ter. Before Steve had become accustomed 
to discover this pure white game on the back- 
ground of glistening snow, it happened sev- 
eral times that he aimed at one bird and 
killed two or three more, which he had not 
seen. Then David would good-naturedly 


CAMP HUNTEKS 


33 


chaff him, saying, ‘‘Laddie, thee art a great 
hunter. Thee wilt become famous like Nim- 
rod of the Good Book!” But after a few 
trips Steve became more skillful in finding 
game than his father. When the weather 
was fine Steve looked for the ptarmigans in 
the open marshes where they were feeding 
on the buds of willows and other low shrubs, 
but when it was blustery and snowing he 
looked for them in sheltered spots along the 
timber. 

However, both Steve and his father soon 
tired of the sport of ptarmigan-hunting. In 
the first place, the birds were plentiful and 
too easy to get, moreover, both the men and 
the cook were not as thankful for ptarmigan 
as they had been for the berries Steve used 
to gather in August. 

The cook grumbled and even swore about 
picking a coopful of Indian hens, and the men 
objected to eating “snow-hens” very often. 
Old Ferguson, whenever he happened to pick 
a wing or a leg a little tough, proclaimed with 
a loud, rough voice, and argued long and with 


34 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


a most serious face that the two Nimrods 
had slipped a pair of tough old snow-owls 
into the pot. 

‘‘Gentlemen,’’ he would exclaim, “I pro- 
test. The company is hunder contract to fur- 
nish me with good clean meat. A Henglish- 
man don’t heat howls. Take them to hold 
Seegush, the ’eathen, ’e’ll heat them. Kill 
us an ox, McLean ; beef his the honly meat for 
a white man ! ’ ’ 

It was all good-natured banter, although 
Steve at first was quite angry because he 
thought the gruff old man was in earnest 
about the owls. 

The truth was that the men were quite 
willing and even glad to eat ptarmigan once 
or twice a week, but the banter and chai^ 
about owls and fish-ducks and frozen crows 
helped to relieve the monotony of the long 
Hudson Bay winter. In fact the men at any 
fur-trading post were always glad to add 
to their supplies such fish and game as the 
country afforded, for the difficulties of travel 
and the distances between posts were so great 


CAMP HUNTERS 


35 


that it was impossible to send in enough food 
from England. Tea, some flour, salt, butter, 
salt pork, and perhaps a few hams reached 
most of the forts. 

But these imported foods were luxuries, 
and the men had to draw the bulk of their sup- 
plies from the country. They lived on pem- 
mican and fresh buffalo meat on Red River 
and on the Saskatchewan, on sturgeon and 
jackfish at Norway House, and on fish and 
fresh and smoked geese and ducks at York 
Factory. At some of the posts, garden vege- 
tables were raised, and these as well as wild 
fruits were relished as great luxuries. 

As the season advanced, the cold increased. 
When the men returned from their work out- 
doors, a rim of white frost clung to their 
fur caps, and their beards looked like huge 
lumpy icicles. On the river and on the bay 
I the ice was already a yard thick, and the 
thundering noise from its cracking and crush- 
ing reverberated through the still arctic 
nights. 

A peculiar atmosphere of expectancy was 


36 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


now spreading through the post. The men 
worked more steadily to finish certain tasks 
before Christmas, which was only two weeks 
off, for Christmas was the great day of the 
year at York Factory, just as it was in old 
London and New York. 

Steve, too, went about with an air of ex- 
pectancy. Christmas had always been a 
happy day when his mother was still living. 
What would it be like with him and his father 
alone in this wild and lonely country? 


CHAPTEE IV 


CHBISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 

T last came the day of Christmas Eve, 



and after the noon meal, the offices. 


the trading-room, and the fur houses 


were closed. 

For men and boys away from home, Christ- 
mas is a day of reminiscences, and with many, 
a day of sadness and acute silent homesick- 
ness. 

The afternoon was spent by all the men in 
tidying up their rooms and houses, an opera- 
tion always sadly needed but seldom carried 
out in most bachelor quarters. 

After they had finished making themselves 
and their rooms tidy, the young men wrote 
letters to friends in Europe and to those sta- 
tioned at distant posts in Canada, in Alaska, 
and in Labrador. 

Most of the writers expressed the wish and 


87 


38 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


hope that they might soon see their absent 
friends and loved ones again, but in their 
hearts they knew well that only in a few 
cases would this wish ever be fulfilled. For 
the Wild North holds her men as in a vise of 
steel, just as the northern winter grips a con- 
tinent with its hard hand. 

'Many a young man who wrote letters home 
on this Christmas Eve had entered the Hud- 
son Bay service ten or more years before, at 
the age of fourteen or sixteen. He had now 
grown into manhood in the service, and felt 
that going back to Europe or to Canada or 
the United States would be beginning life all 
over again. He had learned the fur trade, 
the character of Indians and half-breeds and 
of white men in the trade. He had learned 
to love the free life in the Wild North, but 
for living in the civilized world he felt in- 
stinctively that he had become unfitted. 

His pay had gradually risen from one hun- 
dred dollars a year, and as he received his 
housing, food, and working-clothes free, he 
had a comfortable balance at interest with 


CHRISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 39 


the company. If lie stayed fourteen years in 
the service, his pay would be five hundred 
dollars a year, and he might then be pro- 
moted to the position of a chief trader, and 
later might even become a chief factor. 

The chief traders and chief factors really 
became partners and stockholders in the 
great company and were known as “winter- 
ing partners,’^ and no longer received a 
stated salary. The chief trader received the 
profits of one share of stock and the chief 
factor those of two shares, giving the former 
an income of about twenty-five hundred dol- 
lars and the latter one of about five thousand 
dollars a year, and food and housing free. 
These were attractive incomes in a country 
where one could hardly spend any money 
even if he were inclined to do so. 

It was by such a system of thorough train- 
ing and deserved promotions of its men that 
the letters H. B. C. had come to possess, and 
still possess, a magic spell over their thou- 
sands of employees; and by a just and firm 
treatment in their dealings with the Indians 


40 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


the great company exercised a still greater 
influence over one hundred and fifty thou- 
sand savages scattered over one third of the 
continent. 

The H. B. C. traders never cheated, never 
defaulted payment, never lied, never mis- 
represented their goods. Every man from 
clerk to chief factor knew and did his duty. 
A debt owed by an Indian was never for- 
gotten, a crime was never overlooked, and 
in all the wild forests and swamps and moun- 
tains of Rupert’s Land there was no place for 
a criminal to hide. Some Hudson Bay man 
would find him and bring him to justice. 

When Steve awoke on Christmas morning, 
the fire in the iron stove had gone out and 
the walls of the log house which he and his 
father occupied glittered with thousands of 
ice crystals from the condensed moisture, for 
during several weeks the thermometer had not 
risen above twenty degrees below zero, and 
had often gone down to forty. Only after 
the old stove had been red-hot for several 


CHRISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 41 


hours, did the lace-work of fantastic crystals 
melt and run down the walls in little trick- 
ling streams. 

‘^Father,’’ Steve suggested, ‘‘let’s make a 
trip to Fish-Duck Pool this morning. The 
sun is shining and it isn’t very cold. We can 
easily get back by dinner time.” 

Fish-Duck Pool was a place on Hayes 
River which, on account of springs, remained 
open two or three weeks longer than the rest 
of the river and a flock of diving mergansers 
or fish-ducks always remained here until the 
water froze up. In his zeal as camp hunter 
Steve had, about the middle of October, se- 
cured half a dozen of these good-looking 
ducks and had expected great praise for his 
efforts. But the old gruff postmaster had 
bawled him out for his trouble. 

“Give them to the dogs; don’t try to fool 
the boys with fish-ducks. They’ll rub your 
nose in the snow. Those ducks aren’t birds, 
they’re fish, only they’ve grown feathers to 
keep themselves warm.” 

Steve thought the old man was trying, as 


42 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


he often tried, to fool him, and he cleaned one 
and had the cook fix it for him. When sup- 
per time came, Steve took one good bite of 
his duck and then quietly helped himself to 
a teal. 

‘‘They look like ducks,’’ he thought to him- 
self, “but they surely taste like fish.” After 
this trial Steve often watched the fish-ducks 
dive and play in the dark pool, hut he wasted 
no more ammunition on them. 

After breakfast Steve at once got ready 
for the hike with his father. Over the legs 
of his deerskin trousers he pulled three pairs 
of heavy socks. His feet were encased in 
heavy moccasins; over his shirt of caribou 
skin he donned a leather coat lined with heavy 
flannel and over his head and ears he pulled 
a cap of muskrat fur. His hands were pro- 
tected by heavy mittens which were connected 
by a string around his shoulders, and a heavy 
woolen shawl was wrapped around his neck. 

Thus equipped they followed the trail made 
by the wood-choppers to the spruce ridge. 
It was not a hard-packed trail, for almost 


CHRISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 43 


every night it blew enough to fill up the tracks 
of the preceding day, but the snow was very 
dry and both Steve and his father had learned 
to walk with the long, swinging gait of the 
Cree, when they wandered through the woods 
and over the marshes of Hudson Bay. The 
short, erect steps of the white man are suited 
well enough to European roads and city side- 
walks, but they are out of place on the trails 
and in the woods of a wild country, just as 
the long, slouching steps of the Indians al- 
ways looked queer on the wooden walks in- 
side of the palisades of York Factory. So 
characteristic was the walk of Indians and 
half-breeds that Steve could recognize these 
men by their walk a long way otf. 

There was very little talk as Steve and his 
father trailed through the lone winter land- 
scape, — they had learned to be good com- 
panions without much talk. Nor was there 
much to be seen on the walk which they had 
not seen many times. A red squirrel was 
busy shelling the tiny seeds out of some 
spruce cones. He did not stop to scold at 


44 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


the intruders, for it takes a good many spruce 
seeds to feed even a small red squirrel on a 
cold arctic day. A sluggish porcupine was 
clinging to a spruce, like a crow’s nest. A 
white hare crouched in his form near the 
trail, and, from the top of a dead tree, a big 
white owl was watching for him, while from 
a willow thicket a flock of white ptarmigans 
whirred across the marsh and disappeared in 
a thicket of young spruce beyond, flying so 
fast that the owl made no attempt to catch 
one of them. 

Steve wondered why hare and owl and 
ptarmigan should be white in winter, while 
porcupine and squirrel wore nearly the same 
coat winter and summer. 

When the boy and his father returned 
about five o’clock, the mess-hall presented an 
inviting and festive appearance. 

The chief factor, the doctor, the skipper, 
and several other men were standing in lively 
conversation around the stove which had been 
given a new shine in honor of Christmas. 
The white frost on some of the small panes 


CHRISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 45 


had actually melted, a clean white cloth had 
been spread over the long table, a great 
argand lamp shed a festive luster over home- 
made furniture, gaudily painted walls, and 
large framed engravings. In this out-of-the- 
way place the hall was indeed a palace of the 
White Man’s good cheer and opulence, of 
good will and peace on earth. 

Now several other men who had been hunt- 
ing ptarmigans came in, and as the cook 
peeped in and called, ‘‘Dinner is ready!” a 
most tempting sort of compound odor of vari- 
ous roasts floated through the hall. 

“Be seated, he seated, gentlemen!” came 
from the cheery face of the chief factor. 
“Doctor, sit down at my right; Mr. Shipper, 
will you sit at my left ? Gentlemen, be seated, 
and ‘Merry Christmas!’ to all of us!” 

In came on a big platter a most tempting 
wild goose. Steve thought it was the biggest 
he had ever seen. The goose was followed 
by an immense platter of salt pork, and then 
came a beef roast as big as the cook’s boy 
could carry. 


46 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


‘‘Ah, a real sirloin roast!’’ exclaimed the 
doctor. “Give me a beef roast for an Eng- 
lish Christmas. We’ll eat it to the memory 
of old longhorned Bill, although he was never 
much good at hauling logs. ’ ’ 

The good cheer and merriment at once be- 
came general and a true Hudson Bay appetite 
did full justice to goose, pork, and beef. 

From two decanters of real port and 
madeira, the glasses were filled, and toasts 
were drunk, but when the factor proposed the 
toast to “Absent Friends” a deep solemn si- 
lence fell over the hall; for everybody felt 
that very few of his absent friends he would 
ever see again in this world. 

When the doctor proposed a toast to the 
ladies, silence again fell over the hall, for 
the nearest white woman, the wife of the 
factor at Norway House, lived two hundred 
and fifty miles away, and most of the com- 
pany had not seen a white woman for years. 

The most exciting part of the celebration 
came after dinner. It was the annual dance 
at Bachelors’ Hall, to which every man. 


CHEISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 47 


woman, and child, white, half-breed, and In- 
dian for thirty miles around was expected. 
They had not all been invited because no run- 
ner could have found them all, but they were 
all expected and they all knew it. Christmas 
at York Factory was the great annual event 
in the life of all the Indians who dwelt near 
enough to reach the fort by two days of 
travel. Their number was not large, not over 
thirty adults and half as many children. 

In Bachelors’ Hall the tables had been 
cleared away, benches and chairs had been 
arranged along the walls, and rows of tallow 
candles stuck in sconces along the walls cast 
the necessary brilliance through the ball-room. 

On the benches and chairs sat whites and 
Indians, while around the stove in the corner 
squatted a dozen Indian women wearing 
gaudy cotton print dresses and blankets, with 
showy big handkerchiefs covering their dark 
hair. As the chief factor entered, all of them 
arose with great respect and saluted him in 
the way white women salute only lovers, hus- 
bands, and very near relatives. They then 


48 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


went the round of the white gentlemen. 
Some of the younger men quaked a little at 
this unusual beginning of the dance, while 
Steve disappeared and remained hidden until 
this part of the celebration was over. But 
it was all done so innocently and seriously 
and when the Indian women had to pass by 
the tall old doctor they looked so disappointed 
that all the young men submitted as grace- 
fully as they could. For it was an old cus- 
tom that on this one day the Indian women 
thus showed their respect to the white gentle- 
men of the Company, that did so much to 
make their hard life a little easier. 

And then the dance began. Baptiste 
played the violin with a will, and Ageemik’s 
crazy Joe beat the kettle-drum with much 
vigor and perseverance. Young and old, red 
and white, all joined in the Scotch reels and 
a few other old dances. To the few men who 
ever had taken a white girl to a dance, the 
Indian women looked almost grotesque, as 
they went through every dance with intensely 
grave faces and heavy, swinging movements. 


CHKISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 49 


But they enjoyed it immensely, and the fid- 
dler and the drummer were given no rest. 

At eleven o’clock the musicians stopped. 
Tables were moved into the middle of the 
room and covered with clean white towels. 
On the tables were set platters with cold 
roast caribou, an enormous kettle of hot 
black tea, and then the cook added bread, but- 
ter, and sugar, luxuries which excited the 
palate of every Indian present. 

The big tea-kettle was soon empty and what 
little food was left over the women carried 
away in their handkerchiefs, for according to 
Indian etiquette a guest must not leave any 
food served him, and if he cannot eat it all, 
he must carry the remainder away with him. 

The cook at York Factory once put this 
Indian rule of etiquette to a severe test, and 
the result became one of those stories which 
haunt a man through the rest of his life. 

Old chief, Naginno, the grandfather and 
great-grandfather of many of the Hudson 
Bay Crees, had, through many years’ ac- 
quaintance become a friend of the cook. 


50 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


Naginno always brought some choice fur as 
a present for the cook, and the cook always 
served Naginno with a meal of white man’s 
delicacies, which means that Naginno was 
served with anything the cook happened to 
have on hand and, that Naginno ate and ate 
until he couldn’t eat any more. 

Naginno ’s appetite was prodigious and was 
the subject of much humorous talk and banter. 
The clerks of Bachelors’ Hall drew up a mock 
petition to the Governor of the Company in 
London in which it was set forth that a cer- 
tain Joseph Elison, for many years cook to 
the Honorable Hudson Bay Company at York 
Factory, had conspired with a certain destruc- 
tive monster of the swamps called Naginno, 
that the said Naginno was now rapidly eat- 
ing the Honorable Company into bankruptcy. 
That the said Elison had violated his trust 
by turning Naginno loose on the supplies of 
the Company, and that as a result the serv- 
ants of the Company would soon be in a con- 
dition of starvation and would have nothing 
left to eat but boiled rawhides and moccasins. 


CHEISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 51 


This petition was duly signed and sealed 
and, in the presence of the cook, delivered to 
the captain of the returning ship. The cap- 
tain took the petition with a grave face, and 
the whole affair had been carried through 
with such unbroken mock gravity that Elison 
was not quite sure in his mind whether the 
whole thing was simply one of those numer- 
ous hoaxes and practical jokes which ever 
emanated from Bachelors’ Hall or whether 
the ‘‘Young Gentlemen” really rebelled 
against his occasionally filling up a poor and 
hungry old Indian. 

He decided that the petition was just a 
joke and decided to turn the joke on his friend 
Naginno. 

The next time Naginno called he was served 
with bean soup. This soup was a little hit 
burnt and the cook was afraid to serve it 
to his white boarders. A loaf of bread went 
with the bean soup. 

Naginno, having made short work of the 
loaf, continued his battle against the soup; 
but the case was hopeless. The big kettle 


52 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


held not a quart or two quarts or a gallon, it 
held three gallons. When, at last, Naginno 
was hopelessly filled, the kettle was still half 
full, and Naginno knew it was a little game 
put up to catch him. 

He carried the kettle outdoors where the 
temperature was forty below. Then he went 
in and talked for half an hour to the cook. 
At the end of that time he went out through 
the eating room as if to eat some more soup. 
By this time the soup was frozen solid. With 
quick sharp blows of his hatchet Naginno cut 
the soup out of the kettle, gathered the pieces 
into his blanket and silently vanished along 
the trail, his old wrinkled face grinning and 
chuckling because he had played a ‘^big joke 
on cook. ’ ’ 

He had played a big joke on the cook and 
in his hurry to get away without being caught 
at the game, he had cut many dents and a 
hole or two into the cook’s kettle. One of 
the young clerks, however, had watched old 
Naginno at the game and he showed the 


CHRISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 53 


dented kettle around in Bachelors^ Hall be- 
fore five young fellows took it to the kitchen. 

For a week there was no peace for Elison. 
Several near-fights grew out of the affair, 
the cook swore with many an oath that if the 
bunch didn’t let up on this gagging he’d 
leave the whole miserable bunch and walk it 
to Oxford House and they could all eat their 
grub raw. 

At this juncture the factor interfered and 
told the boys to drop the bean soup, and 
after that only the factor and the doctor had 
the privilege of ever alluding to the story. 

It grew to be the custom, however, that 
every green apprentice sent over from Eng- 
land was in some way induced to ask the 
cook why Indians didn’t eat beans or some 
such question and that as an answer the big 
cook grabbed the caUow apprentice by the 
neck and threw him sprawling into a bank of 
soft snow. And it came to be an understood 
fact in Bachelors ’ Hall that this performance 
was the cook’s share in initiating each ap- 


54 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


prentice into the great fraternity of the H. 
B. C., for the cook was in reality a jovial, 
big-hearted man, more than willing to do his 
share in relieving the monotony of the long 
Hudson Bay winters. 

The two youngest apprentices, the last to 
act in this initiation ceremony very nearly 
induced Steve to mention the dangerous sub- 
ject to the cook. Fortunately, however, 
Steve asked his father before he went to the 
cook, for he had been caught on several gags, 
and David McLean told him the story of old 
Naginno and the dented kettle. 

Old Naginno himself never alluded to the 
incident, and the cook observed the same si- 
lence to Naginno. When the doctor asked 
Naginno about the dented kettle, the sad and 
wrinkled face of the old Cree lighted up by 
a scarcely perceptible smile and his dark eyes 
flashed for just a moment as he replied : Yes, 
I eat a plenty good soup; beans much good 
soup 1 ^ ’ 

As long as he lived, he continued to bring 


CHKISTMAS AT HUDSON BAY 55 


presents of choice fur, game, or fish to the 
cook, and the cook always set out a meal for 
his friend, but an unmanageable quantity of 
soup was never again placed before Naginno. 


CHAPTER V 


A COLD SWIM 

O N the morning after Christmas the 
Indians all left the fort, some going 
in this direction and some in that to 
their widely scattered winter camps. The 
mothers carried their babies on their backs, 
some of the younger children rode on the 
sleighs behind hungry-looking dogs, while 
the men and young women trudged wearily 
through the great wintry solitude, most of 
them living over in their minds the exciting 
time and the great feast they had enjoyed at 
Bachelors’ Hall, and dreaming of the long 
warm days of June when they would all re- 
turn to York Factory with their furs, when 
they would once more indulge in the joy of 
trading in the store and visit a few days 
with their friends. Until then nothing of in- 
terest would happen in their lives unless they 
56 


A COLD SWIM 57 

should get sick or starve, for hunting, trap- 
ping, and fishing had no romance for them. 

The Hudson Bay country harbors quite a 
large number of different kinds of game and 
fur-bearing animals, but nowhere was it ever 
such a hunters’ paradise as the buffalo 
country of the Blackfeet, the moose country 
of the Chippewa, or the deer country of the 
Sioux in Minnesota. 

The hunters of a large Sioux camp at 
Shakopee in the winter of 1841 to 1842 killed 
about two thousand white-tailed deer, sixty 
elk, many bears, several buffaloes and six 
panthers besides a large quantity of small 
game and prairie chickens. 

The Cree country between Hudson Bay and 
Lake Winnipeg never offered such hunting- 
grounds. The game was widely scattered 
over an immense area of great swamps and 
rather barren ridges of jack-pine, spruce, 
birch, and poplar, and where the game was 
scarce the Indian hunters and trappers had 
to disperse over a wide area. 

At the fort, too, life seemed lonesome after 


58 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


the red guests had left. Old Jim Seegush 
and his squaw lingered a few days at the fort, 
for his camp was only a few miles away on 
the western edge of Marsh Point. Jim See- 
gush, although he had been given a white 
man^s name, was a full-blooded Cree. Some- 
times when he was badly in need of tea or 
tobacco he worked a few days at the fort, but 
most of the time he practised the simple life 
and managed to pull through from year to 
year with surprisingly little work, and a little 
hunting and trapping. 

On New Year’s Day, Steve and his father 
walked down the river and out on the bay 
and nearly lost their lives by one of those 
unforeseeable accidents that always lurk in 
the Wild North like treacherous beasts of 
prey. At four o’clock it grew dark, and a 
wonderful display of northern lights shot up 
over the bay, until the flickering whitish rays 
seemed to unite above the heads of the two 
wanderers. Steve even claimed that he could 
hear a fine crackling in the air. A gentle but 
very cold wind had been blowing all day from 


A COLD SWIM 


59 


the south. The wonderful display of the 
aurora caused them to loiter out on the ice 
longer than they had intended, and when they 
finally approached the shore they suddenly 
saw themselves cut off from land by a lane 
of open water which reached east and west 
as far as they could see. It was only some 
thirty feet wide, but too wide to cross even 
on a running jump. They ran east and west 
for some distance, hoping to find a narrower 
place, but no such place was to be seen and 
before a south wind and an outgoing tide the 
line was slowly widening. There was no 
time for thinking it over, for a few minutes’ 
delay has added the name of many a north- 
land traveler to the long list of those that 
never came back. 

‘‘We must swim for it, laddie!” David 
said; “nothing else to do. If we don’t we’ll 
drift out to sea and be caught in a storm. 
You wait a wee bit till I am over.” 

He tossed his long stick across and plunged 
into the dark ice-water. With a few strokes 
he was across. 


60 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


‘‘Now come, boy!” he cried, and Steve shot 
out from the ice. His father held out his 
long stick and pulled the lad up beside him. 
It was all over in less than a minute, but some 
of the cold water ran down on their bodies and 
legs and settled in their moccasins. 

They squeezed their mittens as dry as pos- 
sible, but it was impossible to take otf their 
socks and moccasins, and their coats and 
trousers were almost immediately frozen as 
stiff as boards. 

They helped each other to break the stiff- 
ness at the knees and hip joints as much as 
possible, and then they started on the long 
trip home, for York Factory lay six miles up 
Hayes River. 

Soon Steve complained that his feet were 
so numb that he could not feel them at all. 
It flashed through his father’s mind that per- 
haps the boy’s feet would freeze and then 
he would be crippled for life. Could they 
stop and gather enough wood for a fire to dry 
their socks and moccasins? They had no ax 
and nothing but willow bushes grew on Marsh 



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A COLD SWIM 


61 


Point. Should they strike out for the camp 
of old Jim Seegush? It was two miles 
nearer, but the going across the marsh and 
through the willow brush was much worse 
than the traveling on the river. 

No, it was impossible. They could not 
build a fire and they could not reach old Jim’s 
camp. If they stopped moving they would 
surely freeze their feet and might be caught 
in a storm, for the northern lights generally 
indicate the approach of one. They must 
make a dash for home; it was their only 
chance. 

They pushed ahead as fast as they could, 
although their frozen clothes made walking 
fearfully fatiguing. At the end of the third 
mile Steve fell headlong into the snow. 

‘‘Father, I can’t move my legs any more; 
they feel so awfully sore all over and I can’t 
feel my feet at all!” he cried. 

McLean picked up the boy, placed him on 
his back and stumbled along as fast as he 
could. 

“Put your arms around my neck, laddie,” 


62 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


lie directed anxiously. “We must get home. 
If we stop, we’ll freeze our feet.” 

At the end of a quarter of a mile he set the 
hoy down. “Now you must walk again ! ” he 
said. “Come, take my hand! See, there 
are the lights of the fort. Just swing your 
legs and keep going!” 

Again the lad fell exhausted and again his 
father carried him a short distance. 

At last they reached their cabin, just as 
the strong, wiry McLean began to feel faint 
and unable to control his legs any longer. 

With great difficulty the few glowing coals 
in the ashes were made to start a blazing fire 
of crackling tamarack logs. 

With his hunting knife McLean cut moc- 
casins and socks off the boy’s feet. Thank 
God! They were not frozen, but they were 
almost white, without feeling, and as cold as 
ice. In another half-hour they would have 
been frozen, but by rubbing them with a cold, 
wet towel, David coaxed the red current of 
life back into them. 

When father and son had both donned dry 


A COLD SWIM 


63 


clothing they ran over to the cook, who was 
glad to furnish them a kettle of hot tea with 
sugar and a breast of roast goose for supper 
and promised not to tell for a while of their 
mishap and narrow escape. 

The next morning one of the worst snow- 
storms of the season was roaring over the 
bay and the country. 

“Boy, hoy,’’ remarked David, “we’d have 
frozen to death if we’d been caught in this. 
I knew the fine northern lights meant a storm. 
It was good we plunged in. The men could 
not have looked for us in this storm.” 


CHAPTER VI 


THE GOING OF THE KIVEB 


FTER New Year’s there was but 



little break in the monotony of the 


arctic winter. There was much cold 


weather and still colder weather with many 
days of icy blasts from the frozen bay, until 
it seemed as if neither bird, beast, nor tree 
could live. 

But northern animals are adapted to sur- 
vive the hardships of a severe winter. The 
northern hares are clothed in dense white fur 
and, with their padded feet, skim lightly over 
the frozen snow, while every young tree, bush, 
or shrub is food for them. The several kinds 
of wood and meadow mice hunt under the 
snow-drifts. Their keen noses scent and 
their sharp teeth cut and grind anything that 
can serve as food, from wild seeds to bark 
and bulbs. Where hares and mice change 


64 


THE GOING OF THE RIVER 65 


seeds, bark, and brush into flesh, there fox 
and lynx, mink, weasel, and owl can eke out 
a living. In their frozen castles the beavers 
eat the bark from pickled poplar and willow 
sticks, and their little brothers, the muskrats, 
dive from their houses into the water and dig 
the roots and bulbs under the safe cover of 
the ice. Bear, skunk, and woodchuck survive 
by still another plan; they sleep away the 
time when snow and ice lock up their food, 
while the powerful moose and woodland 
caribou defy both cold and deep snows, and 
browse on the trees of the forests and on the 
beards of lichens that hang from their boughs. 
Musk-oxen and barren-ground caribou even 
look with contempt upon the woods south of 
Hudson Bay; they grow fat on the reindeer 
moss of the great treeless tundras and rocky 
wastes ; the wooded country is too summery 
for them. 

Thus are the wild folk wonderfully made 
to battle and win against the grim northern 
winter. 

It must not be supposed that Steve and 


66 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


his father, although they were keenly look- 
ing forward to the first spring thaw and the 
days when the big ice-floes would grind and 
crush and push down the river, did not know 
what to do with the seven days of the week. 
The short days and the long nights went fast 
for them. 

David McLean had some work to do at the 
store. On some days he helped to cut wood, 
on others he worked with the men in the fur 
houses, and there never was a place, except 
a modern city flat, that could not find work 
for an active boy. It was Steve’s regular 
duty to fill the wood-box and carry out the 
ashes, and the old iron stove was insatiable 
in the consumption of wood. 

The only days which were days of luxuri- 
ous companionship between father and son 
were Sundays and those stormy days when 
the roar of a piercing wind and the flying, 
swirling snow crystals made outdoor work 
impossible. On those days they read and 
talked of so many interesting things that 
Steve often wished for still more storms than 


THE GOING OF THE EIVER 67 


the frozen bay sent down upon them. The 
factory had a good collection of books and 
Steve thought his father could tell better 
stories and knew more history than any other 
man at the factory. 

When they tired of talking and reading 
there were many other things to be done. 
Axes, saws, and other tools had to be sharp- 
ened and repaired, guns needed cleaning, fish- 
ing-tackle had to be looked over, snowshoes 
and sleighs had to be made, canoes needed 
patching, and, of course, Steve and his father 
had to be their own tailors. 

The days rapidly increased in length, and 
about the first of April the snow showed the 
first signs of thawing. Of course it froze 
again at night and became so hard that men 
and beasts could pass over it as if it had been 
solid rock. 

Not before the middle of May did it begin 
to melt in earnest. Until then the contest be- 
tween winter and summer had been a drawn 
battle. Thaws had been followed by hard 


68 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


frosts, and even by snow-storms. But now 
several warm days succeeded one another. 
Streams and rivulets gurgled and trickled 
everywhere over the hanks into the river. 
From high open ground the snow vanished as 
if by magic, and a strong current ran sea- 
ward on the ice of the river. 

On the fifteenth of May, just as the men 
were finishing their dinner, the call came: 
‘‘The river is going In a moment the 
mess-room was deserted and every man in 
the fort was rushing to the gate to see the 
great spectacle which marks on all northern 
rivers the end of a long, hard winter and the 
beginning of a short, hot summer, — ^the going 
of the ice. 

It was indeed a grand dramatic spectacle! 
The majestic river, more than a mile wide, 
appeared like a huge stretch of jagged, crush- 
ing, crunching, pushing, and crashing blocks 
of ice. 

With an invisible but irresistible titanic 
force the huge blocks and floes, two yards 


THE GOING OF THE RIVEE 69 


thick, crowded each other seaward as if they 
had been suddenly endowed with life. Small 
blocks caught between larger ones were 
dashed to pieces and ground into slush. 
Some blocks grounded in shallow water, and 
those behind them rose up on end, piled up 
into huge masses and fell over with a deafen- 
ing crash, like panic-stricken monsters who 
would not be stopped. 

An apprentice with a passion for showing- 
oft ventured out on the whirling blocks, but 
warning shouts from the men called him 
back, and the factor swore he’d send the fel- 
low back to England in irons if he showed 
off any more fool heroics. 

^‘Wait until you have to risk your worth- 
less bones for the Company!” he shouted, as 
he ordered him back into the palisade. 

Within an hour the spectacle changed. A 
huge ice wall had formed below the fort, 
and the water was rising fast. It overflowed 
the bank, crept through the palisade, and for 
nearly a week one could go from one build- 


70 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


ing to another only on the wooden walks, 
and Steve saw why all the buildings were 
raised on posts above the ground. 

At last the ever coming, coming flood dis- 
integrated the ice wall, and cut a wide breach 
through it. With hissing, seething, and 
grinding the whole mass began to move again, 
and in the morning the mighty stream ran 
clear of ice, only numerous stranded blocks 
piled house-high on islands and banks and 
in the marsh, still told of the great annual 
drama which had just passed by. 

The river was open ; summer had begun. 

Within a week the marshes and swamps 
awoke as if by the call of magic. Millions 
of frogs uttered their shrill croak day and 
night. Great flocks of ducks traveled hither 
and thither on whistling wings, V-shaped lines 
of honking geese, miles long, came sailing 
down the river, and the musical cry of thou- 
sands of snipe and plover enlivened the great 
marsh. 

Then tender green leaves began to burst 
the buds on trees and bushes, the roots of 


THE GOING OF THE EIVER 71 


which draw nourishment from a soil that 
never thaws more than a foot or two. 

All over the great wilds of Rupert’s Land 
the drama of the rivers was enacted. The 
Nelson and the Churchill pushed and carried 
into Hudson Bay even greater masses of ice 
than Hayes River. The great MacKenzie 
pushed its frigid loads directly into the Arctic 
Ocean, and the majestic Yukon carries sea- 
ward into the Pacific a vaster load, and builds 
up an ice wall on its great bar, vaster than 
any other of the great northern rivers. 

At York Factory all was activity now. 
The Indians would soon come with their furs, 
and all over the vast extent of Rupert’s Land 
the H. B. C. brigades were preparing to start 
on their long, dangerous journeys over rivers, 
lakes, and rapids, to carry the furs of twenty 
thousand Indian trappers toward the great 
markets of civilization so that the white ladies 
of the big cities might clothe and adorn them- 
selves with the furs which the Indian trapper 
had collected in the unknown and un- 
charted wilderness. And in turn the H. B. C. 


72 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


canoes would carry the products of English 
and other European shops and looms to the 
remotest tribes of forest and mountains. 

Thus commerce has ever since the days of 
Thebes and Sidon and Carthage linked to- 
gether the ends of the earth, and the nations 
that dwell on opposite sides of the world. 


CHAPTER VII 


THE LAST GEEAT HUNT ON THE MAESH 

S TEVE and his father were the busiest 
of all the people at York Factory. Mc- 
Lean was now quite anxious to start on 
the journey to Red River, where he expected 
to meet again all his boyhood friends from 
Kildonan, and where he hoped to acquire and 
cultivate his own land in a region about the 
fertility of which he had heard such wonder- 
ful stories. 

^‘Lad,’’ he often said to Steve, ‘‘if half of 
it is true, we’ll have a better farm than all 
the lairds of Scotland.” 

Old Wahita, a well known Cree hunter and 
trapper, who wished very much to visit his 
daughter and relatives at Red River, had 
been engaged as guide. He had been over 
the route only once, years ago, but an Indian 

remembers a trail a long time, and Wahita not 
73 


74 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


only had the reputation of being a very reli- 
able guide but also was considered one of the 
best woodsmen and most resourceful hunters 
in the whole York district. 

But Steve had made his father promise 
that before they started for Red River they 
would have one more hunt together on the 
Great Marsh. 

The lad was awake early on the morning 
they were to start their great hunt, but 
several robins were already singing cheerily 
from the palisades of the fort and Steve 
called excitedly to his father : 

‘‘Oh, Father! Listen to the robins! 
They’ve come back, too ! They sing just like 
they did in New York State.” 

Our dooryard friends, the robins, nest as 
far north as trees will grow, and even 
farther, and for some reason prefer to live 
near the trading-posts, where the Cree chil- 
dren welcome them as eagerly as the white 
children welcome them a thousand miles 
farther south. 

The June morning was indeed as fine as 


THE LAST GREAT HUNT 


75 


one may experience in New England, New 
York, or Minnesota. The air was still and 
filled with the smell of earth and buds and 
young leaves, while from bushes and stunted 
trees came the joyous song of white-crowned 
and white-throated sparrows and the sweet 
clear whistle of the fox-sparrow, the king of 
our native sparrows, together with songs and 
calls of several small warblers, the names of 
which Steve and his father had not learned. 

It did not take them long to run down to 
the marsh with the current, and Steve could 
hardly sit still when he saw large flocks of 
pintails, teal, and other ducks circle over the 
marsh. A long, dark line of honking geese 
passed right over them and Steve was going 
to fire at them, but his father said: 

‘‘No use, boy. They’re a mile high; you 
couldn’t touch them with a cannon.” 

After following a channel in the marsh for 
a mile or more they pulled their canoe on 
land and concealed themselves in some wil- 
low-bushes near open water. 

They felt quite sure that they would get 


76 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


plenty of ducks, but they wanted some geese ; 
and wild geese, as every hunter knows, are 
much more difficult to approach than ducks. 
Having no decoys which they might set out to 
attract the geese, they tried another strata- 
gem, — they honked like geese. 

Many water birds, including wild geese, 
utter calls which can be heard for great dis- 
tances, so when Steve and his father saw one 
of the wavy lines of the big gray geese in the 
distance, they began vigorously to imitate 
their cries as well as they could. 

The hunters themselves had not much con- 
fidence in their ability to deceive the geese, but 
to their surprise the great line began to 
swerve and circle over the willow-bushes, the 
birds evidently trying to discover their sup- 
posed comrades that had found a good, safe 
feeding-ground. Nearer and nearer they 
sailed, their great wings spread out four feet 
wide against the sky. When they discovered 
their mistake there was a thunderous beat- 
ing and flapping of wings in their efforts to 
escape by rising again high into the air. Four 


THE LAST GKEAT HUNT 


77 


of the big birds the hunters brought down. 
Two fell with a splash into the water, but 
the other two glided away for a quarter of 
a mile, and the hunters had to pursue them 
before they could be captured. 

During the day father and son bagged 
more than forty ducks. Some they secured 
as the birds were flying low over the marsh ; 
others they flushed from pools and water- 
holes and then brought them down as they 
rose, but before they had time to gather speed 
for a straight swift course. There was no 
danger of the two hunters securing more than 
they could use, for during the month just 
ahead, the cooks at York Factory would feed 
more men than many a city hotel, and men 
whose appetites would have quickly eaten the 
keeper of a city boarding-house into bank- 
ruptcy. 

As this was to be their last hunt on the 
marsh, father and son decided to eat their 
supper in the tepee of old Jim Seegush and 
bid him farewell before they started on their 
long journey to Red River. 


78 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


After a hard tramp of about three miles, 
they arrived at the tepee of Indian Jim. 
The tepee was filled with a pungent smoke, 
for Jim^s squaw had a kettle boiling on the 
fire and both he and his squaw were puffing 
their pipes filled with a mixture of tobacco 
and bark of kinnikinnick. Old Jim quite 
often had nothing to eat in his camp and some- 
times he was without tea, but he was never 
out of tobacco. 

In the squaw’s pot were boiling several 
ptarmigans and a large white owl, which, 
having been skinned, looked very much like 
a cat. The two white hunters decided by a 
silent understanding that they would rather 
not eat supper with Jim and his squaw. They 
gave a big goose to Jim, and Jim’s squaw 
offered the tired hunters a kettleful of hot 
black tea, which they were very glad to ac- 
cept. 

Old Jim observed with a grin that the two 
hunters had noticed the white owl in the pot 
and he remarked : 

Ducks plenty, but I’m old man, can’t hunt 


THE LAST GREAT HUNT 


79 


much,’’ and then added in a real cockney 
accent: ’ave to heat the howl.” 

McLean told him that he and his boy, Steve, 
would soon start on a long journey to Red 
River and might never come back to York 
Factory. 

Jim knew the Red River country; for when 
he was a young man, he had, like many In- 
dians in those days, made long journeys on 
the streams and lakes of the North. 

^‘You go to good country,” he said. 
“Plenty grass. Plenty big buffaloes, get 
very fat on much grass. Many Indians 
hunt them. Cree, Chippewa, Sioux, and 
Blackfeet. Chippewa good men. Blackfeet 
bad Indians. Fight Cree and Chippewa, 
fight white men, too! Have horses, plenty 
ponies, ride them all over,” and he waved 
his right arm around. 

“Blackfeet live far west, near big moun- 
tains. Shoot buffalo on ponies. Blackfeet 
catch Wahita long time ago, but Wahita brave 
man, run away all alone, come back to York 
Factory, kill two Blackfeet.” 


80 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


The Swampy Crees lived at peace with their 
Indian neighbors on the south, for those 
never invaded the great barren swamps and 
forests of these northernmost Crees. The 
only people against whom the Crees waged 
war were the Eskimoes to the north of them. 

‘^Wahita goes with us,’’ McLean told In- 
dian Jim. 

^^Good man,” replied Jim, ‘^good man. 
Take you safe. Old man now, but still good 
man. Can travel, hunt much, fight, too!” 

After they had bade old Jim and his squaw 
good-by, Steve and his father tramped back 
a weary three miles to their canoe. The way 
seemed so much longer and harder now, for 
they were both tired and hungry and the 
darkness made the going difficult. 

When they arrived at their canoe, they 
gathered driftwood on the beach and felt 
happy when, at last, their fire blazed up and 
shed its ruddy glow over the cold, dark waters 
of the bay. 

Two fat ducks were quickly cleaned and 
fried on a long wooden spit, and after they 


THE LAST GREAT HUNT 81 

were done their bones were soon picked 
clean. 

‘ HUs great, Father ! ’ ^ exclaimed Steve. ‘ ‘ I 
always want to hunt with you. Mother used 
to fry ducks at Thanksgiving and on Christ- 
mas, and these were almost as good. I was 
getting very hungry but I couldnT have eaten 
old Jim^s owl. I wanted some hot soup aw- 
fully, but I don’t think I could drink owl 
broth. 

‘‘Father, why did the Indian have a trap 
set on top of a post?” 

“That’s the way he catches the owls, Steve. 
You see he doesn’t have to hunt for them and 
it doesn’t cost powder and shot to catch them. 
Owls have the habit of alighting on lone posts 
and dead trees, so that they can watch for 
mice and rabbits. ’ ’ 

For a while father and son talked of old 
Jim and his owls, of their trip to Red River, 
and of mother whom they had buried in New 
York. 

Very soon both grew sleepy and Steve 
thought his father did not feel like talking 


82 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


any more, so they replenished the fire, made 
a bed of dry grass under their canoe, and 
roUed up in their blankets. 

After midnight the first thunder-storm of 
the season blew up from the south. The light- 
ning flashed over the wide brown marsh, the 
thunder crashed near them and rolled away 
over the bay. Steve never woke, but only 
crept a little closer to his father, who arose 
and pushed the hoy’s feet under the canoe 
so that the rain would not pour down on the 
tired lad and awake him from his sound sleep. 


CHAPTEE VIII 

THE GREAT CANOE TRIP WITH WAHITA 

T he chorus of white-throats had just 
begun to whistle their clear ‘‘Sow 
wheat, Peabody, Peabody, Peab9dy ! ^ ’ 
when an Indian and two white men pushed off 
from the landing at York Factory. 

The white-throats are the true early birds 
in the great evergreen forests stretching from 
Minnesota and New England northward to 
Hudson Bay and Labrador. Even in the lat- 
itude of northern Minnesota the first singers 
may be heard as early as half -past two. By 
half-past three the woods ring with the song 
of the full chorus, and during warm moonlight 
nights, solitary birds may be heard off and 
on at all hours of the night. 

Wahita sat in the stern, acting as steers- 
man, McLean knelt in the bow, and Steve 

83 


84 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


used a light paddle from the middle of the 
birch-bark canoe. 

About seven o’clock Wahita steered the 
boat ashore for breakfast. 

^ ^ Boy is hungry, ’ ’ he remarked. ‘ ‘ We get 
long hot day.” 

Wahita traveled after the fashion of the 
fur brigades, which means that he started 
at daylight and traveled several hours be- 
fore breakfast. As soon as the canoe had 
been carefully lifted on shore — a canoe can- 
not be pulled over the rocks like a row-boat — 
Wahita started a fire by means of a flint and 
steel. Tea was soon ready and a liberal ra- 
tion of rohbiboo was allowed to each man. 
Robbiboo was a mixture of flour and pemmi- 
can boiled together into a thick soup. It was 
a common dish with the Hudson Bay brigades 
of those days, because it was very nourishing 
for its weight and bulk. At the present time 
the dish of robbiboo is as extinct as the great 
buffalo herds, from which the old-time pem- 
mican, made of dried buffalo meat and buffalo 
tallow, was obtained. 


THE GEEAT CANOE TRIP 85 


After breakfast Wabita allowed himself 
just time enough to smoke before the three 
travelers again paddled up the river. 

‘‘We have long trip/’ he said. “May be 
we meet much rain. May be we stop two, 
three days in big wind on Lake Winnipeg.” 

Although immense blocks of ice still lay 
stranded on the islands and along the banks 
of the river, thousands of small black flies an- 
noyed the travelers, and towards noon the 
big buzzing horse-flies, or bulldogs, as the men 
at the Bay called them, became troublesome. 

When the sun stood highest, Wahita again 
stopped and said with a kindly smile, “Boy 
hungry ! ’ ’ 

This midday rest was contrary to the rules 
of the fur brigades. They never stopped for 
lunch at noon, but traveled as fast as they 
could all day, because some of the journeys 
were so long, and delays and accidents so fre- 
quent, that the men had to travel with the 
greatest speed in order to complete the round 
trip before lakes and rivers again became cov- 
ered with ice. 


86 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


Not only were Steve and his father both 
hungry, but they were tired, and their knees 
felt sore and stiff because they were not ac- 
customed to paddling long stretches, Indian 
fashion, kneeling on a piece of canvas or a 
handful of brush. 

Wahita, noticing how stiff and tired his 
white companions were, remarked with a 
laugh: White man, soft knees, hurt much; 
Indian, hard knees, no feel ’em.’^ 

They ate a light lunch and rested about 
two hours in the cool shade of some trees on 
a breezy point where the flies and bulldogs’^ 
were not very bad. Then they paddled again 
steadily until evening, except that twice Wa- 
hita stopped for a few minutes to smoke. 

About seven o’clock the Indian began to 
scan the banks for a good camping-place, and 
an hour later he steered to an open place 
where the ground was covered with a soft rug 
of gray lichens and green mosses. 

‘ ‘ Good camp here, ’ ’ he pointed out. ^ ‘ Boy 
pretty sore, sleep fine on soft bed. Not many 
mosquitoes, breeze catch them.” 


THE GKEAT CANOE TRIP 87 


A more liberal meal consisting of hot tea, 
roast duck, biscuit, and salt butter was soon 
ready and enjoyed with leisure. 

After supper Steve piled large pieces of 
driftwood on the fire while Wahita smoked 
and gazed at the fire in silence. 

Steve was wondering whether the old man 
was thinking of the Blackfeet, for he looked 
as if his mind were far away. 

wish he would tell about them,^’ Steve 
thought, but Wahita remained silent. 

The night was warm, and Steve and his fa- 
ther wondered what would be “many mosqui- 
toes’’ to Wahita, for the breeze did not seem 
to carry them away as Wahita had indicated. 
Both Steve and his father were trying hard 
to rid themselves of the pests by sitting in 
the smoke and by flapping their large blue 
handkerchiefs. 

Again Wahita laughed at them, saying: 
“White men, thin-skinned, mosquitoes like 
them much. No like Indian very much. No 
like pipe-smoke. 

“We make good trip to-day. May be 


88 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


thirty miles. May be we make forty to-mor- 
row ; may be fifty next day. 

think we sleep/ ^ and with those words 
the Cree wrapped himself in his blanket and 
lay down under the upturned canoe. 

Steve and his father retired into their tent, 
which was provided with a sod-cloth and 
could be pinned mosquito-proof. 

‘‘They may not like an Indian very much, 
but they would eat us up if we didnT have 
this tent. Only an Indian can sleep with his 
head under the blanket, observed McLean. 

If Wahita was wrong about the mosquitoes, 
he was right about the soft bed and about the 
boy being very tired. 

White-throats, thrushes and other birds 
were still singing, and from a distance came 
the weird, wild calls of owls and loons and the 
long-drawn-out howl of a wolf, but to Steve 
neither bird nor beast was of any interest. 
He had scarcely taken off his clothes and crept 
under the blanket when he was sound asleep. 

Soon after daylight Wahita called: “On- 
ishka, onishka!’^ which means in English: 


THE GEEAT CANOE TRIP 89 


^‘Get up, get up!” and when the two white 
men emerged from their tent, the Indian had 
a fire burning and breakfast was ready. It 
consisted of hot tea and a dish new to the 
white travelers. 

‘‘Richeau very much good,” commented 
Wahita, as all three sat down to eat; ‘‘better 
than rohhihoo.” 

Steve and his father found that they did 
like richeau better than rohhihoo. It con- 
sisted of pemmican and flour fried together, 
and it was very rich and not so mushy as 
robbiboo. 

As they traveled up-stream the wild unin- 
habited country began to look less monoto- 
nous. The clay banks grew higher, and in 
many places deep gullies had been chiseled 
into them by numerous side-streams. 

They passed great landslides, which had 
slipped into the broad river with the stunted 
spruces still growing on them. Back from 
the banks, as far as the eye could see, ex- 
tended vast swamps covered with a scattered 
and stunted growth of tamaracks and spruces, 


90 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


and with a low bushy growth of dwarf -birch, 
Labrador tea, and crowherry, all growing 
from a spongy blanket of pale-green peat- 
moss. 

As the three canoeists paddled south- 
ward up-stream day after day the character 
of the streams and the forest gradually 
changed. 

From Hayes River they turned into Steel 
River and then into Hill River. In this 
stream navigation became difficult on account 
of about a dozen foaming and roaring rapids 
which a canoe cannot ascend, and where canoe 
and baggage have to be carried over short 
portages. 

On the evening of the fifth day they reached 
Knee Lake, a body of water forty miles long, 
and they spent the first Sunday of the trip 
resting on a beautiful high island in the south- 
ern end of the lake. 

The three men had now traveled southward 
two hundred miles, and the trees were here 
much larger than on Hayes River. Birch 
and poplar, jack-pine, spruce and balsam grew 


THE GKEAT CANOE TEIP 


91 


in wild profusion, and the summery forest 
was enlivened by the songs of thrushes, war- 
blers, and native sparrows. Some swallows 
skimmed over the lake on the waters of which 
loons, gulls, and many kinds of ducks 
screamed, quacked, and played. 

On Monday evening, having made about 
two hundred and fifty miles in seven days’ 
travel, they arrived at Oxford House, a Hud- 
son Bay post located on the northern end of 
Oxford Lake. 

Oxford House was then, and is even to this 
day, the only place inhabited by white men on 
the great canoe-route between Norway House 
and York Factory. 

As both Steve and his father were tired 
out by paddling and portaging day after day, 
they desired to rest a few days and visit with 
the men at the post. 

Wahita did, at first, not take kindly to the 
idea of resting several days. 

‘‘We had fine weather,” he argued, 
“pretty soon rain come. Eain all day. 
Wind blow all day, all night, may be all next 


92 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


day. We sit in camp. I smoke all day. 
White man get mad, swear at bad weather. 
Do no good, rain all same, blow all same. No 
travel ! ’ ’ 

‘‘But, Wahita,^’ replied McLean, “the boy 
is tired out. He isnT used to paddling and 
fighting mosquitoes, and he will not travel 
without doing his share of paddling. ’ ’ 

Wahita smoked a minute in silence. Then 
he grunted: 

“All right. Boy tired. Got skinny. We 
rest three days.’’ 


CHAPTEE IX 


A HAED STBETOH 

S EVEEAL parties of North Country 
canoes had arrived at Oxford House 
and among them was the Eed Eiver bri- 
gade which had left Fort Douglas the first 
week in June and had met with much foul 
weather and many delays on Lake Winnipeg. 

The stories these men told of the Selkirk 
settlers on Eed Eiver were not cheerful. 
Provisions had again been scarce in the settle- 
ment and most of the settlers had again spent 
a miserable winter with the Indian and half- 
breed buffalo-hunters on the plains west of 
Pembina in the United States. 

The second war between the United States 
and England was happily ended, but the very 
air was full of talk and rumors of war and 
bloodshed between the two rival fur com- 
panies, the Hudson Bay Company and the 

93 


94 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


Northwest Fur Company of Montreal. In 
the far north, the Hudson Bay Company had 
been able to retain a monopoly of the fur 
trade, but in the border country near the 
United States the Northwesters had become 
powerful and aggressive rivals. They consid- 
ered the new Red River settlement as a move 
of the enemy, intended to ruin their business, 
and they had threatened to destroy the iso- 
lated, infant colony. What might happen if 
the armed men of the two rivals should clash, 
nobody could tell. 

On the fourth day Wahita and his com- 
panions started southward on Oxford Lake. 
All three used their paddles with renewed 
vigor. On the second day when they were 
traveling over a route of small ponds and 
channels with marshy shores, Wahita landed, 
and, pointing to a dark trail over the peat 
bog, said, ‘‘Caribou! Cross here this morn- 
ing. We get one.’’ 

A white man turns hunter from time to 
time, an Indian is a born hunter and is always 
hunting. It was as natural for Wahita to 


A HAKD STRETCH 95 

notice the tracks of wild animals as it was for 
him to breathe. 

He had seen many tracks along the route, 
wolf and hear, lynx and otter, and caribou, 
but of the caribou he had always remarked; 
^‘Too old. Caribou far away! Travel all 
time. ’ ’ 

But now he was as alert as a setter that 
has struck fresh trails of grouse. 

‘‘Just gone a little while,’’ he observed, as 
he seized his gun and followed the trail. 
“May be we catch them eating moss on tama- 
rack on big bog. ’ ’ 

Without saying any more he tested the di- 
rection of the wind and began to make a de- 
tour around the bog to head them off. 

“You make no noise,” he cautioned, as he 
saw that Steve and his father were following. 
“Caribou has sharp ears, fine nose, too. 
May be we fool them. ’ ’ 

About a mile from the place where they 
had crossed the stream he headed off a band 
of six and killed a yearling buck. 

Within less than an hour a framework of 


96 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


poles had been erected, the buck bad been 
dressed, and tbe meat was being smoked and 
cooked over a slow fire. 

While tbe meat was being cured, Wabita 
sat in the shade and smoked. ‘ ^ Caribou very 
much good,’’ be chuckled. ^^Mucb better 
than robbiboo, much better than white man’s 
salt pig-meat. ’ ’ 

During tbe next two days tbe travelers 
bad to paddle, push, and drag tbe canoe over 
many miles of swift water, and bad to make 
several long portages, tbe worst part of tbe 
trip being tbe seven-mile gorge of Hell Gate. 
All three were glad, when on the evening of 
tbe fourth day out from Oxford House, they 
carried their canoe and baggage across tbe 
divide at Painted Stone and made camp on 
tbe westward fiowing part of tbe Ecbimamisb 
River. 

‘‘He fiow both ways,” said Wabita, point- 
ing down tbe sluggish brown current of the 
Ecbimamisb, which wound placidly along 
among low banks that were covered with 
spruce, tamarack, and willows. 


A HARD STRETCH 


97 


‘‘He is good river, the Indian continued. 
“Just one more portage. We paddle all 
way quick to Red River if big wind don’t 
catch us on big lake.” 

For canoeing the Echimamish proved in- 
deed a good river as Wahita had stated. No 
longer did the travelers come to one boiling, 
roaring rapid after another ; the placid brown 
current swung peacefully this way and that 
through the great summer marsh, past pic- 
turesque jungles of cattails and rushes that 
were alive with blackbirds and other feath- 
ered songsters, but the mosquitoes were not 
peaceful. Nowhere else on the whole route 
had the bloodthirsty swarms been so thick and 
relentless. Nowhere along the whole stream 
was there a breezy point or rock for a short 
respite. Each canoeist in turn hastily ate a 
bite of lunch while the other two kept the 
canoe moving, for the minute the craft 
stopped going, the pests became unbearable. 

Great was the joy of the travelers, when 
late in the afternoon, the birch bark shot into 
Playgreen Lake, and when, towards evening 


98 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


they at last reached the important post of 
Norway House, with its many commodious 
buildings. 

However, their joy was soon turned into 
consternation, for the post was crowded, not 
only with voyageurs from the Saskatchewan, 
but with refugees from Red River. The 
dreaded blow had fallen. There was no 
longer any settlement on Red River. On 
June sixteenth, the H. B. C. people and the 
Northwesters had clashed in the disastrous 
encounter known as the Massacre of Seven 
Oaks, and more than twenty of the H. B. C. 
men had been killed. 

Fort Douglas was in possession of the 
enemy and the settlers had fled ; some of them 
to Norway House, others to the neighborhood 
of Toronto in Canada. 

McLean was in doubt as to what he should 
do now. He would not go back to York Fac- 
tory and spend another winter on Hudson 
Bay. He could not stay at Norway House, 
for the post had already more people than it 
could feed or house. 


A HARD STRETCH 


99 


He decided to go on. If he could not 
stay at Red River, he would go on to Pem- 
bina in the United States. Wahita also was 
desirous of proceeding. 

go find my daughter,’’ he said. no 
see her long time. Never see little papooses. 
We look out sharp. Camp in woods. Bad 
men don’t find us. Don’t know we are there. 
We go on.” 

After a good night’s rest, during which no 
mosquitoes had troubled them, the three com- 
panions embarked again, and before the day 
was done they glided out upon the grand ex- 
panse of Lake Winnipeg and made their first 
lake shore camp on Montreal point. From 
their camp they could just see the low land of 
Mossy point to the north, while toward the 
west the sun sank slowly into the red and or- 
ange expanse of Lake Winnipeg, the waters 
of which stretched westward and southward, 
vast and endless, with no land in sight, like an 
ocean. 

They had at last reached the Lake of the 
Big Winds. 


CHAPTER X 

ON THE LAKE OF THE BIG WINDS 

S TEVE’S heart quaked a little when Wa- 
hita made ready next morning to push 
the canoe through the low, rolling 
breakers into a lake that looked as endless as 
the ocean. Winnipeg was the first really big 
lake Steve had seen, and the waves that came 
rolling in endless succession from the west 
looked as if they might any moment swallow 
up a thousand small bark canoes, although 
only a light breeze was blowing. Steve was 
afraid to think how big they would be in a 
storm. 

‘‘Are there any whales in this lake?” he 
asked his father, for he had often seen small 
whales in Hudson Bay. 

Wahita smiled at this question. “No, 
boy,” he replied, “no whales in big muddy 
100 


THE LAKE OF THE BIG WINDS 101 


lake, only in salt ocean. We catch some fish, 
may be, and eat him for supper. 

‘‘You sit very still, he added, as he pushed 
off, and the canoe began to bob up and down 
as it struck the incoming crests. “No jump! 
No hand on gunwale. We tip, may be we 
drown, all three!’’ 

Wahita was cool and skillful with the pad- 
dle. The canoe rose on the crests and glided 
into the troughs and seemed to be picking its 
own path, so that Steve became quieted and 
was no longer afraid. 

Hour after hour the travelers paddled 
steadily. About noon they were off Shoal 
Point and Wahita turned the bow square to 
the west against the waves. 

“You hold him straight,” he said, “I 
smoke a little. Boy eat a little. Then we 
go on. May be we camp on Poplar Point, 
twenty miles south.” 

When he had finished smoking, the Indian 
turned the bow farther from the land, in or- 
der to cut off an eastward swing of the shore 
line. Again they paddled steadily and al- 


102 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


most in silence for several hours, until a fairly 
high, wooded point arose far to the southeast. 
‘‘Poplar Point,’’ murmured Wahita. “Ten 
miles. Work hard now. I feel big wind 
coming!” 

It was not long before the big wind did 
come, and with it the waves seemed to double 
in size almost instantly. 

The travelers were running before the 
wind now and were making good time, but in 
spite of this the spray began to dash over 
the stern. “Go fast now,” ordered Wahita. 
“May be we get swamped. Pull hard!” 

Neither Steve nor his father needed the 
order. 

Every minute the force of the wind in- 
creased ; higher and higher rose the seething, 
white-crested lines. Dark clouds began to 
rise behind the wooded hills eastward, but as 
yet a strong westerly wind blew toward them. 

“Pull hard!” urged Wahita again. “We 
get swamped if wind turns. We make shore 
or drown, all three.” 


THE LAKE OF THE BIG WINDS 103 


Before wind and waves the canoe shot 
swiftly shoreward, but not swiftly enough. 

A big wave splashed over the stern and 
then another and another. 

“Dip it out, Steve cried David McLean, 
hut Steve had already begun, before his 
father had uttered the few brief words. 

Not another word was spoken. McLean 
and Wahita strained every muscle at the pad- 
dles, Steve sat on his knees trying his best 
to bale out as much water as splashed in over 
the stern. His arms began to ache and he 
changed from right to left and from left to 
right without looking up. The water was 
gaining on him and they could not keep afloat 
much longer, but all sense of fear had left 
him. 

The picture of the open lane on Hudson 
Bay arose in his mind. 

“If she fills, he thought, “wefll hang on 
to her and drift ashore. We can all swim.’’ 

A big, foaming breaker washed almost over 
the heads of all three of them, filling the 


104 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


canoe, and the next moment the craft came 
down with a crash on a beach of swirling sand 
and bowlders. 

The three dripping men jumped out. The 
canoe was full of muddy water, but as they 
pulled it out of reach of the breakers, and the 
water ran out of several holes in the bot- 
tom, they gave a shout of triumph. 

‘‘We^re all right, Father!^’ cried Steve, 
^‘this is more fun than swimming in the bay.^’ 

Wahita turned the canoe over. ‘‘Damned 
bad lake,’’ he muttered. “I put patches on 
holes. Make it all right.” 

It was not long before a big fire was blaz- 
ing and the tent was set up under the shelter 
of some low trees. 

The “big wind” blew all night and the 
waves splashed and seethed on shore and 
bumped the big bowlders against one another, 
and the wind roared and howled, and the rain 
came down in torrents. 

“Bad lake,” said Wahita as he looked over 
the turbulent waves in the morning. “We 
stay in camp and dry things.” 


THE LAKE OF THE BIG WINDS 105 


Steve and Ms father did not mind the de- 
lay, for there was no particular hurry now 
about their getting to Red River; one week 
would be as good as another. 

Wahita, after he had patched the canoe, sat 
most of the day smoking his pipe and looking 
out over the lake. 

‘‘A queer fellow an Indian is,” remarked 
McLean to Steve. ‘‘I think he can sit all day 
without batting an eye. He doesn’t know 
what it means to be impatient.” 

On the second morning the wind had gone 
down, and after Wahita had walked along 
the shore a little way, he came back and said : 

‘‘We go. Big wind has gone dead.” 

But the big wind had not really “gone 
dead”; it had only gone down enough to 
make traveling possible and the three men 
had all they could do to creep down the coast 
another thirty miles. In the evening they 
were quite glad to run into the sheltered bay 
of Berens River. 

Wahita repeated his terse remark about the 
bad lake, and all three agreed that they 


106 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 

would stay here and enjoy themselves till 
the weather became more favorable. 

Wahita spent most of his time fishing, while 
Steve and his father paddled up Berens 
River to the mouth of the Etomami. On a 
small tributary of the Etomami they discov- 
ered something neither of them had ever seen, 
a beaver dam, and above the dam in the large 
pond they found several heaver houses built 
of poles and mud, as all beaver houses are 
constructed. 

Sitting down quietly on the bank for half 
an hour they saw their first beaver, that was 
swimming with his head just above the water 
and pushing a green poplar pole ahead of 
him. When he scented or sighted the two 
intruders he struck the water a mighty blow 
with his flat tail and dived with a resound- 
ing plunge. Twice he reappeared as if to 
reconnoiter, and each time he disappeared 
with a slap and a plunge. 

In the evening, when the travelers had built 
a big camp-fire on the bank, Steve begged 
Wahita to tell him about the wonderful works 


THE LAKE OF THE BIG WINDS 107 


of the beaver, and Steve’s father also joined 
in the boy’s request. 

An Indian is slow in making friends of the 
whites, for he knows that the whites look 
upon many of his beliefs as superstitions and 
make fun of them. But both Steve and his 
father had treated Wahita with great respect, 
and after a good supper and two days of rest, 
the old hunter was in a pleasant talking mood. 
He laid aside his pipe and said : 

will tell you what I know about the 
heaver people. A long time ago, before a 
white man had seen our forests, the heavers 
were real people and had a language just like 
the Crees and the Chippewas and the Black- 
feet. They made war against the Indians 
and threatened to kill them and all their 
women and children, for the heavers were 
very numerous everywhere and were brave 
fighters although they were smaller than the 
Indians. 

‘‘But Manitou did not want all the Indians 
killed, so he changed the beaver people into 
animals and took away their language, so 


108 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


they could no longer hold a council and plan 
to go on the war-path. But he left a little 
language in the young beaver children so 
they can cry when they are hungry. If you 
sit near a beaver house, when the sun gets 
down behind the trees, you can often hear the 
beaver children crying like the papooses in 
the tepee, and then their parents and big 
brothers know that it is time to go and cut 
some boughs from the poplars and bring 
them to the little people in the lodge, for the 
little people can eat the leaves and the soft 
twigs, but their teeth are not strong enough 
to cut wood.’^ 

^‘How can you see the heaver people?’’ 
asked Steve. ‘^Are they not afraid to come 
out of their houses?” 

After a moment’s thought, as if he were 
sounding the motive of Steve’s question, 
Wahita explained: 

have often seen all the big and little 
beavers come out of the house and I have 
heard the beaver children cry when I had 
climbed a tree and the beavers did not know 


THE LAKE OF THE BIG WINDS 109 


that I was there. An animal cannot see or 
smell a hunter in a tree. 

think the beavers are animals now, al- 
though many Indians think they are still peo- 
ple, but we all know that Manitou has taught 
them many things which no other animals can 
learn. 

^‘They can build dams and make a big pond 
out of a little creek. They remember that 
once they had hands and arms, and so they 
dig up mud with their forefeet and pile it 
across the little streams just like children 
when they play in the mud after a big rain 
has made many little streams. If the stream 
is big, they bring sticks and poles and brush 
and pile mud against it and make a big dam 
as long as a hundred canoes and as high as 
the big tall doctor at York Factory. And 
when the pond gets bigger, they put more 
mud and sticks on the dam.’^ 

‘^What do they do when the rain from a 
storm breaks their damT^ asked Steve. 

‘‘When the water from a big rain breaks 
the dam or when a hunter cuts it, they come 


110 IN THE GKEAT WILD NOETH 


at night and fix it, for in the daytime they 
are afraid of the Indians. 

‘‘When Manitou took away their stone 
knives and axes, they begged him and said: 
‘We have to cut down trees to get food for 
our children ; give us something that will cut 
wood.’ So Manitou gave them big sharp 
teeth and they can cut off chips as big as 
the Indians can cut off with their hatchets.” 

“Can they cut real big trees?” asked the 
boy. 

“Yes, big trees,” answered Wahita. 
“There are no big trees in our country, but 
in the Blackfeet country the beavers cut down 
trees as big around as a man. ’ ’ 

“And what do they do with the trees, 
Wahita?” 

‘ ‘ They cut off the boughs and float them to 
their lodges and then they eat the bark and 
they and their children grow fat even in win- 
ter when other animals starve. They pickle 
many poles and much brush in the cold water. 
Then when the ice covers the ponds they sleep 
in their lodges, and when they get hungry 


THE LAKE OF THE BIG WINDS 111 


they dive out and get a stick just as an In- 
dian takes a piece of meat out of his kettle. ’ ’ 

Wahita was silent and lit his pipe, but the 
boy wanted to hear more of the wonderful 
beaver people. 

‘‘What else did Manitou teach them?” he 
inquired. 

“He taught them many other things be- 
cause he took away much knowledge from 
them. He made them forget how to make a 
fire so they might not come through the forest 
at night and burn our lodges. 

“He took away all their canoes and made 
them forget how to build them again. When 
they tried to build new canoes and none of 
them could remember how to begin, they cried 
much and said : ‘ How can we live and escape 
from our many enemies if we cannot cross the 
lakes and rivers?’ 

‘ ‘ Then Manitou took pity on them and said : 
‘I will make you so that you will not need 
canoes. Your fur will grow so thick that the 
cold water will never touch you, and your 
hind feet shall grow strong for swimming. 


112 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


and I will give yon each a paddle such as no 
other animal has as far as the sun shines on 
earth/ and as he spoke, he made all their 
tails grow flat like a paddle, and it is true to 
this day that no other animal has a tail like 
the beaver. 

^^Then the beavers were very happy and 
said they were glad that they were no longer 
the kind of people they used to be and they 
were glad that they no longer had to hunt for 
food and tan skins for clothing and no longer 
had to go to war against the Indians and the 
Eskimoes. 

‘‘They all dived into the water to try their 
fur, and their strong hind feet, and their new 
tails. And they found that they could swim 
very fast both on the surface and under water 
and could dive quickly and rise quickly, for 
with their new tails they could steer them- 
selves both right and left and up and down. 

“They played a long time and had great 
fun in the water. They slapped the surface 
with their tails and dived below with loud 
plunges. 


THE LAKE OF THE BIG WINDS 113 


‘‘And a wise old beaver said: ‘I have dis- 
covered a signal. When a beaver sees an 
Indian or smells a wolf or a lynx or an otter, 
he shall slap the water with his tail and dive 
with a plunge. Then his friends will hear 
him and will all hide from the enemy.’ 

“Manitou had not thought of this signal, 
but he let them keep it and since that day 
the beavers all use and understand the slap- 
and-plunge signal. 

“When the sun began to sink westward 
and they were still playing, Manitou waved 
his hand to them and called them. 

“ ‘You must stop playing now,’ he said. 
‘You make so much noise that the Indians 
will come and shoot you with their arrows. ’ 

“Then the beavers again set up a great 
cry and told Manitou that they had no place 
to live now, for the Indians and the wolves 
and lynxes and bears lived everywhere in the 
forest. ‘You have made us such little peo- 
ple now,’ they said, ‘that we can no longer 
fight the Indians and the big animal people.’ 

“Then Manitou placed his hand over his 


114 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


eyes and sat down on a log and thought a 
while and then he said: 

H will give you all the lakes and the 
ponds and the streams to live on, and you will 
always remember how to make large still 
ponds out of little streams. In the lakes and 
ponds you shall build your safe lodges, but 
on the large rivers you will dig holes in the 
bank and your children shall become very 
numerous from the all-summer lands of palms 
to the all-winter lands of little sticks. 

“ H will give you your little brothers, the 
muskrats, for company, because the fishes and 
crabs and turtles who also live in the water 
are dull and slow-witted people and are not 
good company.’ 

‘‘Then Manitou pointed to the lake and 
clapped his hands three times. The beavers 
all swam across to an island, where they slept 
all night, because they were very tired after 
playing so much and learning so much, and 
when they woke up in the morning they had 
forgotten their language, but to this day they 
remember everything Manitou taught them. 


THE LAKE OF THE BIG WINDS 115 


‘‘For you must know that anything which 
Manitou has taught to a man, bird, or beast 
is never forgotten, and the children know it 
without learning it ; but anything which Mani- 
tou has not taught to man, bird or beast is 
easily forgotten and the children of each gen- 
eration have to learn it all over again.’’ 

The fire had burned low and all three sat 
in silence, listening to the dull rush of the 
westerly wind over the tree-tops. Suddenly 
there was a booming slap and plunge, as if a 
ten-pound rock had been thrown into the 
river. Steve and his father gave a start, but 
Wahita smoked unmoved and remarked: 
“ It is a beaver. He heard some of my words, 
but he has forgotten our language and now 
he has told his people that we are here by 
making a big noise in the water.” 

“Did Manitou teach the beavers any other 
things?” Steve asked timidly. 

“He did,” answered the old man. “But 
it is now late and we must sleep. If the wind 
dies, we must travel to-morrow.” 

Steve poured a kettleful of water on the 


116 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


fire, Wahita stretched out under the canoe, 
and Steve and his father rolled up in their 
blankets in the tent. 

Three or four times the beaver made his 
great signal noise, and once Steve could hear 
the spattering of the drops close to shore ; 
then all became silent except the blowing of 
the wind over the forest. 


CHAPTEE XI 


TO THE END OF THE BIG LAKE 

T last the wind from the west that 



had blown steadily for days died 


down. The wild, grewsome waves 


that had driven one another day after day and 
night after night, and had dashed against the 
eastern shore like great living white-crested 
batteries and had drowned all sound of hu- 
man voices with their ceaseless pounding, 
splashing, and seething, had sunk into gentle 
swells and ripples which played and babbled 
on the sand and among the rocks like ‘‘a 
still, small voice.’’ 

And as McLean looked over the vast inland 
sea, with islands large and small rising from 
it, his thoughts ran back to the wonderful 
stories told in the book he knew best, and he 
saw Elijah on Mount Horeb. For had he not, 
like Elijah, felt the passing of the Lord in a 


117 


118 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


great, strong wind that broke in pieces the 
rocks, and had he not watched the waves 
whose pounding caused the rocks to tremble, 
and had he not seen the red fire of the western 
sky? But now there was only the still, small 
voice on the wild shore. The morning sun- 
light played amongst the foliage of the primi- 
tive forests, and from everywhere came the in- 
spired songs of thanks of the thrushes, war- 
blers and white-throats. It seemed to McLean 
as if the Good Lord had sent an answer to his 
silent prayer that he and his only child might 
not perish in the waters and forests of the 
wilderness, but might, sometime, again live in 
a real home, as they did when the boy’s 
mother was still with them. 

Wahita and the lad had been loading the 
canoe and the boy’s lusty shout and Wahita ’s 
call : ‘ ‘ We go now ! ’ ’ roused the father from 
his reverie. 

Once more they were afloat on the big water 
with the bow pointing southward. It was 
ideal traveling. To the west they could 
plainly see Berens Island, while southward 


TO THE END OF THE BIG LAKE 119 


another large island and a number of small 
ones and Pigeon Point loomed like dark 
fringes and patches on the clear blue horizon. 
It seemed impossible that this beautiful sum- 
mer lake could be so quickly stirred into a de- 
structive uproar. 

‘‘We are over bad part of lake,’^ said 
Wahita. “Water gets narrow; we go close 
to land all time. Kun to shore quick if wind 
jumps up.’’ 

In the evening they reached the Narrows 
and camped on Dog-Head Point, where the 
lake is scarcely two miles wide. Early next 
morning they passed Bull-Head Point, the 
southern end of the Narrows. 

South of this point the lake again widens, 
reaching in places a width of nearly thirty 
miles. But over a part of the stretch the 
force of wind and waves is broken by large 
islands, and nowhere in the southern half 
does the west wind rush over a sweep of 
sixty miles of open water, as it does in the 
northern half. 

Wahita could have chosen a safer route by 


120 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


creeping along the west shore, but that would 
have made the journey from Norway House 
to the Narrows twice as long. Moreover, 
there are very few good camping-grounds on 
the low western shore, and the mosquitoes 
would have been even more numerous and 
bloodthirsty than they were on the sluggish 
brown waters of the Echimamish. For these 
reasons the Hudson Bay brigades always fol- 
lowed the route along the east shore and took 
their chances on foul weather. 

On the evening of the third day after they 
had left Berens River, they made camp on a 
sandy point at the mouth of Red River, and 
the great dangerous lake lay behind them. 

After supper Steve built a big camp-fire of 
driftwood, which threw its ruddy glare far 
over the quiet water, while from the great 
jungle of rushes and reeds close by came the 
voices, calls and cries of countless ducks, 
geese, coots, rails, bitterns, and other water 
birds, all joining in the never-to-be-forgotten 
chorus of the summer night, such as Steve 
and his father had never heard before, a 


TO THE END OP THE BIG LAKE 121 


weird, wonderful grand opera to which are 
admitted only those who travel our wild 
northern lakes and rivers in canoes, and 
sleep in light tents under the canopy of the 
summer stars. 

Silhouetted against the red fire, Wahita sat 
and smoked. see daughter and papooses 
pretty soon. May be I visit them a long 
time,’’ he said, breaking a long silence, into 
which he relapsed, as a smile softened his 
serious dark features. 

‘‘Wahita, tell us the rest about the 
beavers,” Steve ventured to beg. 

Again Wahita smiled. “May be, I tell pa- 
pooses all about the beavers. My father told 
me a long time ago, when I was smaller than 
Steve, long before I saw a white man.” 

“What else did Manitou teach the 
beavers ? ’ ’ Steve asked, emboldened by the old 
man’s answer. 

“I tell you,” Wahita began, “what else he 
taught them. 

“He let them remember a little about build- 
ing lodges, so they can build big tepees of 


122 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


sticks and mud. They always build them in 
the water, and the door is under the water, 
so the wolf and the lynx and the bear can’t 
go in, but the otter can go in because he can 
swim like the beavers themselves. When all 
the beavers are at home he is afraid to go in, 
but when only the little beaver children are at 
home, he sometimes goes in and carries one 
away and eats him, hut most of the time he 
catches fish and crayfish.” 

^Hs it true?” asked Steve, ‘‘that they have 
more than one room in their houses?” 

“No, the big doctor lies. The beavers had 
only one room in their tepees when they were 
people. How can they remember to build 
more than one room? But it is a big room, 
so big that a hoy can sleep in it. 

“It is a good safe house. When the pond 
freezes, the roof of the house freezes also, 
and the wolf and the lynx and the okeecoo- 
haw, the wolverine, cannot break the roof, 
and Manitou puts the black bears to sleep 
when the ice comes. 

“Manitou also taught the beavers to build 


TO THE END OF THE BIG LAKE 123 


many dams one above the other, so they can 
make several ponds and can travel by water 
and cut aU their trees close to water, for it is 
not safe for them to travel far on land. That 
is the reason they are afraid on land. Even 
Wabooh, the rabbit, can scare them, although 
he cannot bite and cannot scratch. 

‘‘They can also dig canals from one pond 
to another so they can travel fast by water 
all the way, and they also float their poles on 
the canals. ’ ^ 

“What else do they know?’^ asked Steve, 
when he thought Wahita was going to stop. 

“One thing more Manitou taught them,’’ 
Wahita continued. “They can make a trail 
which only a beaver and a good Indian hunter 
can make out. They do not cut trees and do 
not mark trees on the trail, but they make 
little things of mud, as the cook at York 
Factory makes little pies. ’ ’ 

“Oh, mud-pies?” exclaimed Steve. 

“Yes, mud-pies,” Wahita confirmed. 
‘ ‘ They make a trail of little mud-pies. When 
a big beaver goes away to find new trees he 


124 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


makes a trail of mud-pies. Not many, but 
just a few where he has crossed from one 
water to another. Then, may be, another 
beaver comes along and finds the mud-pies 
and smells them and follows the trail and so 
the big lone beaver gets a mate and they 
build a house on a new stream, where many 
poplar trees grow and where their children 
find much food. 

‘^Now I have told you all the beaver peo- 
ple have learned and all they remember. 

^‘Before the white men came to our coun- 
try the beavers were much more numerous 
than the Indians, but since the Hudson Bay 
Company buys their skins and sells traps to 
the Indians many thousand beavers are 
caught every year. I think Manitou did not 
know about the white people and did not 
teach the beavers to look out for steel traps 
and they are not able to learn it. Only the 
wolf and the fox and the okeecoohaw can 
learn about steel traps. 

‘‘Now I have told you all my father told 


TO THE END OF THE BIG LAKE 125 


me about the beaver people, and all I have 
learned of them myself.’’ 

The fire had burned down to a heap of dull 
red coals and the blackbirds with the golden 
heads and those with the red shoulders had 
gone to sleep in the rushes and only those 
water birds whose cry and call may be heard 
all night, like the loon and the wild ducks and 
the little marsh-wrens, were still awake. 

‘‘We must go and sleep,” admonished 
Wahita, “for to-morrow we paddle against 
the current of Bed Kiver all day.” 


CHAPTER XII 


IN THE WAR ZONE 

T he trip up-stream past stands of 
good-sized elms, maples and cotton- 
woods was most enjoyable, and the 
feeling that they had safely passed through 
the dangers of Lake Winnipeg put all three 
of the travelers in a happy frame of mind. 

The charm of river travel, where one looks 
for something new and unusual as he rounds 
each bend of the stream, took hold of them. 

The Red River, having cut its bed through 
the almost level soft clay bottom of the 
former glacial Lake Agassiz, is noted for its 
winding, curving, serpentine course. Again 
and again they passed the same point twice, 
but they never tired of watching the banks 
for turtles, lazily taking a sun-bath on a log. 
If the canoe came too close, the ever-watch- 
ful creatures plumped precipitately into the 
water, like so many stones. 

126 


t 


IN THE WAR ZONE 


127 


Once they surprised a white-tail buck 
standing in shallow water. At Stevens yell 
the animal dashed into the timber, where he 
snorted and stamped till the canoe had 
passed. The comical antics of a black bear 
they watched for a time while he crudely 
practised the art of old Izaak Walton on some 
shallow rapids. He was in luck, too, for he 
brought down his heavy paw on several ven- 
turesome suckers and devoured them while 
they were still wriggling. 

Another bear they observed making a rich 
meal on a mess of may-flies which wind and 
current had thrown up on shore. 

‘‘Bear eat everything,^’ Wahita com- 
mented ; ‘ ‘ that ’s why he grows so big and fat. ’ ’ 
Steve never tired of watching the great 
blue herons that stood like meditating phi- 
losophers in shallow water, and rose slowly 
with a kinked neck, outstretched legs, and 
laboriously flapping wings. 

Another source of interest and amusement 
to Steve were the ducks that seemed to be 
giving their broods of varying age and size 


128 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


lessons in watercraft and woodcraft. The 
mother ducks showed great alarm and 
quacked and flapped their wings, acting as if 
they could neither swim nor dive nor fly. 
But invariably, after the little ones had dived 
or hidden on shore, the mother flew grace- 
fully up or down stream. 

Steve was so sure that he could catch some 
of the little ones on shore that Wahita landed 
and let him try, but although Steve hunted 
twice ten or fifteen minutes for a brood that 
he had seen conceal themselves in the weeds, 
he never even saw a single duckling. 

‘^They sit very still,’’ Wahita remarked, 
with a laugh at Steve’s failure. You no see 
them. 

‘^Mother ducks are big liars. Try to fool 
you. Many birds are liars. Grouse is big 
liar, night-hawk is big liar. 

Eagle and fish-hawk is no liar. Fly 
around and scream and tell you where nest 
is. But it is always in big tree and you can- 
not climb to it.” 

On the second day the travelers reached 


IN THE WAR ZONE 129 

Fort Douglas, still occupied by tbe North- 
westers. 

Their reception was neither hostile nor 
friendly. McLean called it watchful. They 
were evidently suspected of being spies of the 
Hudson Bay Company. 

After staying a week near the fort they 
thought they had convinced the Northwest 
factor that they were not spies. They had 
also learned that Wahita’s daughter and 
friends were camping on the Assiniboin about 
fifty miles westward. 

The case of McLean and Steve, however, 
was bad. David ^s friend, McGolrick, had 
been drowned, and all his other friends had 
gone to Toronto where the Northwest Com- 
pany had given them land and none of them 
would come back to Red River. 

McLean did not wish to go to Toronto, 
moreover the Northwest Brigade whose route 
to Canada lay by way of the Winnipeg River, 
Lake of the Woods, Rainy River, and Fort 
Williams, had left a week ago. 

He did not wish to return to Hudson Bay. 


130 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


He did desire very much to go back to the 
United States. In those days, however, 
Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin was the near- 
est white settlement that could be reached 
from Fort Douglas by way of the Red, 
Minnesota, and Mississippi Rivers. Fort 
Snelling had not yet been built. 

Steve was more than willing to undertake 
this six-hundred-mile trip with his father. 

^‘Father, you and I will get there all 
right,’’ he asserted with boyish confidence. 
‘‘We have learned a lot about canoeing and 
camping and hunting and Indians.” 

However his father’s sober reflection could 
not take the hoy’s light-hearted view of the 
enterprise. It was too long and too danger- 
ous a journey for him and Steve alone, and 
he had no means to hire one or more men, 
even if men willing to go could have been 
found. 

If they went by themselves, they would 
he exposed to all the accidents of the long 
journey. In a party of two, if one man takes 
sick or is disabled, the other cannot carry 


IN THE WAR ZONE 


131 


him very far, nor can he leave him and go 
far for help. 

But the greatest obstacle was found in the 
warring tribes of the Chippewa and Sioux 
Indians. If he and Steve undertook this long 
journey alone, they would be entirely at the 
mercy of any Indians they happened to meet. 
And they could not hope to complete the trip 
without falling in with some of them. No, he 
could not expose his boy and himself to the 
mercy of these warlike, uncontrolled savages. 

But what could he do I Stay with the 
Northwesters at the fort! They evidently 
did not want him and he did not wish to stay 
with them. 

He decided to talk it all over with Wahita. 

Wahita listened quietly to everything 
McLean had to say. 

“You have spoken well,’^ he began in re- 
ply; “you should not go to your country by 
way of Hudson Bay. The journey is too long 
and you would have to start back to-morrow 
or you might miss the big ship for England. 

“You must not travel through the coun- 


132 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


tries of the Sioux and the Chippewas. They 
are always fighting, they are not peaceful 
like my people, the Swampy Crees. They 
might kill the boy, they might kill you, too. 
You must not go. I cannot go. I am afraid 
to go. We three could not fight them. They 
are too many. 

‘Ht would be bad to stay here. There are 
too many bad men in the fort. They drink 
firewater and talk loud and get angry. 
When the firewater rises to their heads, the 
evil thoughts break out of their hearts. 
They still suspect you. When your eyes are 
turned away one of them might stab you or 
shoot you. 

“Then your boy would be all orphan, no 
mother, no father.^’ 

Wahita was silent and moved a little closer 
to the small camp-fire, for the night was cool, 
although the season was midsummer. 

“I think, my friend,’’ replied McLean, 
“you have spoken the truth and your words 
are wise. But what is the best thing for the 


IN THE WAR ZONE 


133 


boy and me to do I Tell me, if your mind 
has thought it out. ’ ’ 

have thought much of what my friend 
and the boy should do, and I will tell you 
all that is in my heart. 

‘‘You may go with me up the Assiniboin. 
My friends will be your friends, and if they 
have meat, you and the boy will have meat. 

‘ ‘ But white men do not like it in an Indian 
camp all summer and all winter. 

“We make much noise. The dogs bark, 
the papooses cry, the drums beat with a loud 
noise. We are Indians, you are white men, 
and sometimes we have no meat, and in the 
winter our tepees are cold as soon as the fire 
goes out. 

“You need not come to us. You and the 
boy can find a good hunting-ground. You 
can make a warm cabin, you can hunt moose 
and bear and rabbits. You can trap beaver 
and muskrats and other animals that bear fur. 

“When the ice has gone down the rivers 
and the leaves break out of the buds and the 


134 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


bright yellow flowers bloom in the marshes I 
will come back and meet you at the fort. 

‘‘Now I have told my sons what was in my 
heart and I have spoken truthfully and con- 
cealed nothing.’’ 

After he had again been silent a while he 
said that he would like to say something more 
to his white sons, but it was something he 
had heard and did not know whether it was 
true, it was only a rumor and a feeling among 
the Indians. 

Having been assured that his white sons 
would be happy to hear anything their wise 
father might wish to say, Wahita explained 
that there was a report current amongst the 
Indians near the fort that Lord Selkirk was 
in Canada and that he would come with sol- 
diers and would take Fort Douglas away 
from the Northwesters and that all the set- 
tlers now at Norway House would come back. 

“I do not know if this talk is true,” con- 
cluded Wahita. “But I know that two Chip- 
pewas are now visiting the Crees near the 
fort. These Chippewas have come from 


IN THE WAR ZONE 


135 


Lake Superior by way of the great muskeg 
route between Lake of the Woods and Red 
River. This is a short route to Red River, 
which only the Indians travel, because white 
men do not like the big swamp. 

“These two men who are friends of the 
Hudson Bay people heard in their country 
that Lord Selkirk was in Canada.’^ 

After McLean had thought all these mat- 
ters over carefully he decided to stay at Red 
River, at least till the following summer. 
For he felt quite sure that Lord Selkir'k, 
after he had spent so much money, time and 
work on the settlement, would not give it up 
without a fight. Nor could he believe that 
the strong old Hudson Bay Company would 
surrender without a struggle such an impor- 
tant point as Fort Douglas. 

Fort Douglas stood near the junction of 
the Red and Assiniboin rivers, and in those 
days commanded the fur trade of a vast 
region around it, just as the city of Winnipeg 
to-day is the center of an immense trade in 
grain, live stock, and general merchandise. 


CHAPTER XIII 


WITH THE CREES AND BY THEMSELVES 

I T was now only the month of July and 
Steve and his father had at least a 
month before they needed to think of 
locating and establishing their winter camp. 

They accepted gladly Wahita’s invitation 
to visit with him the small Cree village, where 
his daughter lived. For a few knives and 
other things they bought three Indian ponies 
and started across the plains for the Cree vil- 
lage. 

Horseback riding was rather new business 
to all of them. Wahita told of how he used 
to ride fast ponies, while he lived among the 
Blackf eet. ‘ ‘ But now, ’ ’ he said, ‘ ‘ horse feels 
lots hard and may be I fall otf. I must learn 
again. Indians all ride horseback on Assini- 
boin. ’ ’ 

McLean and Steve were also poor horse- 
136 


WITH THE CREES 


137 


men, because the Hudson Bay Company at 
York Factory no more used horses than did 
the Swampy Crees in their big woods and 
swamps. 

Both father and son were glad when, after 
they had ridden about twenty miles, Wahita 
said: think we camp.’’ 

Steve said he had never felt so sore in his 
life and he wished they had gone up the river 
in a canoe. Their horses were tethered out 
on ropes, for Wahita told his friends if the 
horses were left to run free, they would run 
back to Fort Douglas during the night. 

Their camp was made near a small creek 
on the edge of a poplar grove, which dotted 
the prairie of that region. As the night was 
pleasant and there were no mosquitoes, they 
built a brush lean-to with a good camp-fire 
in front of it. 

McLean and Wahita seemed to fall asleep 
very soon, but Steve was wakeful. All his 
bones ached and the prairie around seemed 
to be alive with howling brutes. There were 
low howls and high-pitched howls, distant 


138 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


howls and near-by bowls. From time to time 
the horses snorted, and now some preature 
came mstling and sniffing around quite close 
to the camp, and Steve sat up to see what it 
was, for he felt his hair rising as he thought 
that a wolf might spring at them. But it was 
only a badger scurrying about and trying to 
smell out the sleeping hole of some striped 
gopher so that he might dig him out and 
make a meal of him. 

Wahita, noticing the boy’s restlessness, 
told him to go to sleep and added: ‘‘Wolf 
and coyote just howl in summer time; don’t 
come near camp and fire. Just like to sing 
and make noise.” 

All three were glad when, the next evening, 
they arrived at the Cree camp, where they 
were greeted by deafening yelps and barks 
of some twenty dogs of all colors and pedi- 
grees. 

Wahita and his friends were given a tepee 
by themselves which Wahita ’s daughter kept 
in order. 

Many new things interested Steve in the 


WITH THE CKEES 


139 


Cree camp. The women were nearly always 
busy. Some were weaving mats out of strips 
of cedar bark which they had gathered more 
than a hundred miles to the east at a camp 
on Lake of the Woods. Some were tanning 
skins, others were knitting fish-nets, and some 
were taking care of their children just as 
white mothers do. 

The men in camp were just sitting around 
doing nothing, at least so it seemed to Steve ; 
but Wahita told him that the men made long 
trips after butfalo, elk and other game and 
that the work about the camp was the duty of 
the women who would not let the men inter- 
fere with it. 

Another thing Steve at first did not like was 
the absence of any time for meals. However, 
as there was plenty of meat in camp, every- 
body helped himself from the kettles that 
were always boiling, and Steve and his father 
found all the meat they could eat in the kettle 
of Wahita ’s daughter. 

A boy in the tepee next door was sick, and 
an Indian medicine man had been called to 


140 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


cure him. During most of the time for three 
days and three nights the man kept droning 
and chanting his songs, which Steve could 
not understand. At times he fell to stretch- 
ing the arms of the sick boy and sucking his 
chest. When he stopped sucking he showed 
a large splinter of wood which he claimed he 
had sucked out of the boy’s breast. The next 
day he showed a large black water-beetle, the 
kind which nowadays sometimes gather at 
the electric arc-lights. This he also claimed 
to have sucked out of the boy. 

On the third day the medicine man left and 
took with him a pack of blankets and tanned 
skins as pay for his services, but the sick boy 
did not get well. One day his father lifted 
him up on a pony and rode around the camp 
several times, as fast as the pony could run. 
A friend had told the father that he could stir 
up new life in the boy in that way. But the 
poor lad grew worse and died a few days 
later. The Indians wrapped his body care- 
fully in blankets and butfalo skins and tied it 


WITH THE CREES 141 

in the limbs of a tree a few miles down the 
river. 

Both father and son were glad, when at the 
end of four weeks, they turned the heads of 
their ponies again toward Fort Douglas. 
They had enjoyed their stay with the Crees, 
but they had learned that Wahita had told 
them the truth about an Indian camp. It was 
indeed a noisy, restless place. 

Steve, true to boy nature, had thoroughly 
enjoyed it. Like a real boy, he had soon 
learned to lie down and go to sleep in spite of 
dogs and drums and dancing. However, the 
treatment of the sick boy lingered even in 
Steve’s mind as a ghastly experience. But 
McLean declared, ‘‘I am too old to learn to 
live like an Indian.” 

One thing both father and son had learned 
during their stay in the Indian Camp: they 
had both become good horsemen. Steve, es- 
pecially, could ride any Indian pony that was 
not a plain, vicious bucker. Both had also 


142 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


learned to feel at home on the plains and to 
find places from the directions of Wahita. 

Their stay at Fort Douglas was short. 
They bought some pemmican of the Indians 
encamped there under Chief Pusick, and a 
dozen traps they secured of the Northwesters. 
With guns, powder, shot, balls, and other 
things McLean had wisely equipped himself 
at York Factory. 

Wahita had told them where to hunt and 
trap during the winter. ‘‘You ride straight 
toward the morning sun from Fort Douglas,’’ 
he had told them, “till you come to the end 
of the land of grass and yellow flowers, which 
the whites call prairie. After two or, may be 
three sleeps you come to the sand ridges, 
where the pines grow, the Cree pines, I call 
them. They are the same pines that you have 
seen in my country at Norway House and at 
Oxford House, the pines that make a big fire 
and a black smoke, so you will know them 
when you see them again, although they grow 
bigger here than they do far north where 
the winter is so long. ’ ’ 


WITH THE CEEES 


143 


Following these and other instructions Wa- 
hita gave them, Steve and his father started 
east from Fort Douglas on their first long 
journey all by themselves. 

It was surprising how easy it was to follow 
the directions of the old Cree. When the sun 
was not shining they looked at the watch that 
tells you where you are going — ^Wahita’s de- 
scription of a compass — and took their bear- 
ings toward a distant poplar grove or 
knoll. 

They traveled on horseback and had taken 
one extra pony as a packhorse to carry their 
outfit. 

Steve was as happy as only a hoy can he. 
Often he galloped ahead to be the first to look 
over the next rise, or he ran a race with a 
startled coyote. He had forgotten all past 
troubles and did not think of those ahead. 

The prairie at its best will call out the joy 
of living in any one whose soul is not dead to 
sunlight, grass, and flowers. And the prairie 
was at its best now. The endless expanse of 
soft green was studded with countless dots, 


144 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


wreaths, splashes, and patches of goldenrods 
and other wild flowers, while on the dryer 
stretches the reddish and bluish purple spikes 
of blazing stars and lead-plants filled in the 
pattern of the emerald carpet. 

To Steve, however, the play and war of 
birds and animals was even more fascinating 
than the great scenic canvas of grass, groves, 
and wild flowers. A pair of coyotes enticed 
him a mile out of his way, always showing 
themselves in plain view on a rise of ground 
against the sky. So excited became Steve 
that he fired a ball after the coyotes, and 
when they finally disappeared in the tall 
grass on the edge of a big slough, Steve did 
not know at first in what direction the wily 
beasts had led him. 

When he rejoined his father he discovered 
somewhat to his chagrin that once more some 
wild creatures had fooled him. The elder 
McLean was lying at ease in the grass, and 
pointing to a hole in the ground near them, re- 
marked : 

^‘They fooled thee finely, laddie. Here^s 


WITH THE CEEES 145 

their den, and the pups are all down in the 
hole/’ 

In front of the den, in a little depression 
half as large as an ordinary schoolroom, the 
grass was trampled down, and several old 
butfalo bones with many tooth-marks on them, 
as well as a dead rabbit and gopher, showed 
that this sunny spot was the outdoor kinder- 
garten of the coyote pups, where they played 
and gamboled and learned the things a coyote 
must know to live on the plains not only in 
summer, the time of ease and plenty, but also 
in winter when the blizzard roars over the 
prairie. 

Many hawks, small and large, were seen 
everywhere, sailing overhead or quietly 
perching on a rock or knoll. And around 
every perching hawk three or four gophers 
were sitting up at respectful distances in 
front of their holes, scolding as loud and as 
fast as they could. 

Steve thought they made a noise as if they 
were swearing at the hawks in the gopher 
language. 


146 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


‘‘I wish,’’ lie said, ‘‘Wahita were here, so 
he could tell us what the Indians know about 
all these animals and birds. ’ ’ 

Following Wahita’s directions, they trav- 
eled across the pine ridges about as many 
miles as a man has fingers on his hands, till 
they came to a country where the land is all 
rock. Here they turned directly north and 
traveled once more as many miles as a man 
has fingers on both hands. 

‘Hf you keep your eyes wide open,’’ Wa- 
hita had concluded, ‘^you will then see a string 
of little lakes which are tied together by a lit- 
tle river. There you must find a good place 
to camp and stay all winter. You will find 
muskrats and beavers and rabbits, and may 
be a bear and a moose, if you watch for their 
tracks. 

‘Hf you get lost, boy must climb tree and 
look. I come in spring and camp under big, 
wide elm I showed you near Eed Eiver. If 
you are not there when white man says, ‘It 
is June,’ I come and look for you.” 

They did not get lost, but the boy climbed 


WITH THE CREES 


147 


many trees to look, just for the fun of it, for 
Steve felt himself quite important in helping 
his father to pick out the route in a wild, un- 
known country. 


CHAPTER XIV 


ALONE IN THE FOEEST 

N ear a stream flowing into a small 
lake they found a place which seemed 
to meet all the requirements of a 
good camp. 

It was near good clear water. There was 
plenty of wood for fuel, and a thicket of 
young jack-pine would shelter them against 
severe northwest storms. No very tall trees, 
that might attract lightning or might break 
down in a storm grew close by, but there was 
an abundance of straight jack-pines and white 
birches about half a foot in diameter, just the 
right size for camp-fires, when the evenings 
would grow cold, as well as for winter use 
when an abundance of fuel becomes a matter* 
of life and death with settlers and campers 
in a northern climate. 

For campers and Indians in the forest, na- 
ns 


ALONE IN THE FOKEST 149 


ture has solved the problem of fuel so that 
a man only needs an ax to make available the 
heat which the summer sun has stored in pine 
and spruce and birch. The frontier settlers 
on the treeless plains of the United States and 
Canada, however, had to solve the problem 
for themselves. They twisted the long, 
coarse prairie hay into solid ropes, or they 
burned buffalo chips and cow chips, or dug 
peat out of the sloughs and lignite out of the 
hillside. 

Man’s wild kindred also find their shelter 
in the forest, and nature has given them a 
heavy coat of fur instead of the clothing with 
which man provides himself. 

The little dwellers on the open plains, go- 
phers, badgers, and prairie dogs, had to learn 
to provide their own shelter. They have for 
ages dug warm burrows into mother earth, 
long before the Indians of the plains built 
their sod-houses and the white pioneers exca- 
vated their sod-covered dugouts into the hill- 
side. From the small four-footed people of 
the plains man learned to provide himself 


150 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


with primitive shelter on the great plains 
where no tree or bush breaks the sweep of the 
storms from the great arctic seas and tun- 
dras. 

For a few days Steve and his father used 
their horses to explore the high and fairly 
open country in the neighborhood. A man on 
horseback cannot travel through dense timber 
nor over marshy and boggy ground. The 
foot of the horse has been perfected for trav- 
eling over hard and dry ground, but hogs 
and marshes he instinctively avoids, because 
he is afraid of being mired, and even the most 
spirited wild horse, mired in a bog, becomes a 
helpless prey to the ever-hungry wolves and 
other flesh-eating beasts. 

It soon became plain to both father and 
son that they could not keep their horses over 
winter. The forest would, indeed, afford 
them plenty of shelter, hut deep snow would 
hide all food from them and the wolves would 
be sure to get them. So they decided to do 
as Wahita had told them. 


ALONE IN THE FORE'ST 151 


‘‘You let ponies come back/’ be bad ad- 
vised. ‘ ‘ They run with Indian ponies around 
groves on prairie. May be they die, may be 
wolves eat them, may be they live and you 
get them again next summer.” 

So they rode them a mile along tbe trail to 
Red River, took off tbe bridles and let them 
go. 

And now both father and son felt that they 
were actually alone in tbe solitude of tbe wild 
forest, for tbe borses bad been a kind of com- 
pany to them. 

Steve led tbe life of a bappy, care-free boy 
wbo lives for to-day and takes no thought of 
to-morrow, but bis father felt tbe serious re- 
sponsibility of bringing bis son and himself 
through tbe winter, a new problem to him, liv- 
ing here many miles away from both whites 
and Indians. 

On one point Wabita bad quieted bis fears. 
He bad assured McLean that all tbe Chip- 
pewa and Assiniboin Indians were friendly to 
the whites, against whom they bad never 
waged war. “And tbe Sioux,” he said. 


152 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


never come to Lake Jessica nor the 
other lakes near it. 

‘‘To come to Lake Jessica they would have 
to cross the big Lake of the Sandhills and 
come down the Winnipeg River. When I 
was at Red River long time ago I heard of 
Sioux coming down the Red River to the 
mouth of the Assiniboin and even to Lake 
Winnipeg, but no Sioux has ever seen the 
Winnipeg River, which runs with many white 
leaps over the rocks from the big Lake of the 
Sandhills to the Lake of the Big Winds.” 

The problem of shelter for the winter had 
to be solved by father and son. They had 
set up a regular Indian tepee in preference 
to a white man’s tent. There were no mos- 
quitoes during the cool August nights, and on 
rainy days they kept a fire going inside the 
tepee, which they could not have done in a 
tent. 

How should they live during the winter? 
Should they brave the cold in the tepee with 
plenty of blankets and a fire in the center, or 
should they build a log cabin or some kind of 


ALONE IN THE FOREST 153 


a dugout? Steve was for living in the tepee. 
‘Hf the Indians can do it, we can,’’ was his ar- 
gument. 

^‘We can do it,” his father agreed, ‘^but I 
fear it would he a cold life when the wind 
comes down from Hudson Bay. And re- 
member, lad, we have no stove as we had at 
York Factory.” 

In the end they agreed to live in the tepee 
as long as the weather remained pleasant, hut 
to build a dugout for use when the tepee 
should become too cold. 

Any one who has ever camped in the great 
glacier-planed country which stretches from 
Lake Winnipeg to Lake Superior, Isle Royale, 
New England and Labrador, knows that over 
vast regions of this area one cannot build a 
dugout without blasting it out of the solid 
rock. On many otherwise good camping-sites 
there is not even soil enough to hold a tent- 
stake. 

The only place Steve and his father could 
find for building a dugout was a ridge of 
bowlders which wind and ice had shoved up on 


154 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


shore when, years ago, the lake stood at a 
higher level. Such bowlder ridges may be 
found on nearly all lakes of any size in North 
America, but to Steve and his father their 
origin was a puzzle, for in those days the 
work of ice and wind was not well under- 
stood, and it was not even suspected that a 
long time ago a large part of North America 
was covered by a vast sheet of ice resembling 
the great masses of ice that now cover Green- 
land and the antarctic continent. From the 
work of this great ice sheet resulted the thou- 
sands of lakes on which we fish, hunt, sail, 
and skate at the present time. But this was 
something Steve and his father could not 
know, nor did Wahita know it. To him 
Manitou had made the earth as it now is, only 
some regions he had made a good country 
and others a poor country for the Indians to 
live in. 

Building a dugout in a ridge of bowlders 
was no easy work, but Steve and his father 
went at it with the same spirit that boys build 
a shack. With stout poles they pried loose 


ALONE IN THE FOEEST 155 


the bowlders big and small. Most of the 
stones they could throw out by band, but some 
were so big that they had to roll them out by 
using their poles as levers. 

Modern trappers generally carry a folding 
sheet-iron stove and iron pipes to their camps, 
but there was no stove in McLean’s outfit, so 
they had to build a fireplace and flue as best 
they could. The hardest part to make was 
the flue or chimney. To build this they stood 
a big dry pole on end and piled stones and 
clay around it. By using stones that would 
not fall out and by taking care that the pole 
did not stick, they built a flue which looked as 
if it might really work. 

The roof was the next part to be built. 
They had planned to make it out of cedar 
bark, but found that the season was so far ad- 
vanced that the cedars would not peel, so they 
used poles, sod, and marsh-grass instead. As 
they had no tools but their hunting-knives 
for cutting grass and sod, building the roof 
was also hard work. 

‘‘We must make a good job of it,” McLean 


156 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


admonislied when Steve grew tired of the 
work. ‘‘If we don% rain and snow-water 
will drive us out when we most desire to stay 
in/’ he added, good-naturedly. 

Of course the cave, as Steve called the place, 
had no window. The door consisted of a 
piece of tarpaulin tied to heavy sticks, and 
when it was set in place, the cave was dark, 
except for a little light which fell down the 
smoke flue. 

At last the cave was finished, and now came 
the great moment of trying the flue. Would 
it draw, or would it smoke? 

Steve carried in some live coals and dry 
sticks which he blew into a flame, and the 
curling smoke spread at once through the 
cave. 

“It won’t work. Father,” he exclaimed, 
much disgusted. “It will smoke us out!” 

But his father told him to put on some more 
dry wood and to open the door. ‘ ‘ Get a draft 
through the door and let the flue get warm, 
and may be it will work,” he said, and it soon 


ALONE IN THE FOREST 157 

worked so well that a blaze went clear up the 
flue. 

Steve gave a shout, turned a somersault 
in the cave and cried : ‘‘Now we^re all right, 
Father! If it gets awfully cold, as at Hud- 
son Bay, we can crawl into the cave and build 
a fire and you can tell me stories all day. ’ ’ 

It was now past the middle of August, and 
both Steve and his father had worked or trav- 
eled hard every day since they had arrived 
at Lake Jessica. 

In order to conserve their small stock of 
flour, beans, peas, and bacon, they had been 
compelled to catch enough fish and rabbits and 
other small game to supply their daily needs. 
Steve had also collected and dried quite a 
supply of blueberries, which grew sweet and 
large in the exposed rocky depressions 
around the lakes, as well as in some open 
swamps. 

When Steve came home with a kettleful of 
the sweet big berries, his fingers and mouth 


158 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


dyed witli tlie purplish juice of the wild fruit, 
father and son agreed that Wahita was right 
in his enthusiastic praise of menahga, the 
blueberry. 

‘‘Blueberries were the last fruit Manitou 
made/’ he had told them, “and they are the 
best. All the wild cherries have a big stone 
and only a little meat; they are very good 
only for the birds. The strawberries and the 
raspberries are very good, but Manitou for- 
got to give them a place that is their own. So 
they can only grow where a fire has killed the 
forest, but after a few summers the bushes 
and trees always come back and the vines of 
the red berries have to find another place, and 
that is the reason why there are never enough 
of the red berries. 

“Next Manitou made the cranbendes that 
grow on the little low vines and he put plenty 
of meat in them and made the seeds small and 
he remembered to give them a place that is all 
their own. He gave them the wet marshes 
where they can grow in the moss and among 
the thin wire-grass, and where the trees and 


ALONE IN THE FOREST 159 


bushes cannot drive them away. There are 
plenty of them, but they cannot grow sweet on 
the cool damp moss, and they are very good 
only when the big cook at York Factory mixes 
them with the white man’s sugar or when they 
are mixed with the tree sugar of the Chip- 
pewa country. Without sugar they are too 
sour. 

‘‘At last Manitou made the blueberries. 
He took a new color for them because all other 
berries are red or black. He gave them 
plenty of meat and made the seeds small and 
he did not forget to give them a place that is 
all their own. I think he gave them not only 
one place but three places. He gave them the 
little hollows on the rocks, where there is too 
little earth for trees to grow, and he gave 
them the sunny hillsides, where the pines are 
but few, and he also gave them many dry and 
open swamps, where they grow among the 
swamp-tea bushes. One summer I think they 
grow best in one place, and the next summer 
I think they are best in another place. But 
the Indians can always find plenty of them, 


160 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


and they are very good because the sun shines 
on them and makes them sweet. 

‘ ^ They last a long time, too. Some are ripe 
when the wild birds are still singing, plenty of 
them are ripe during the moon when the wild 
ducks and geese cannot fly, and they are still 
plentiful in the dry marshes during the moon 
in which we gather the wild rice. 

‘ ^ The birds like them, the animals like them, 
and Magwah, the black bear eats them till his 
big stomach is full. 

^‘They are the best fruit Manitou planted 
in the forest.” 

Steve did bring home several other kinds of 
wild berries, but none were half as good as 
the big ripe blueberries. Shadberries, choke- 
cherries, high-bush cranberries and sand-cher- 
ries added some variety to their diet, but all 
of these were rather sour without sugar, a 
luxury the two campers did not have. It 
was expensive and not in common use in those 
days. Wild plums were scarce around the 
lake, and for black-walnut and butternut 


ALONE IN THE FOREST 161 


trees Steve looked in vain. They do not 
grow so far north. 

As soon as the cave was finished Steve 
urged his father to build a canoe. * ‘ Then we 
can fish and hunt,^’ he argued, ‘‘on all the 
lakes. Without a canoe we can’t get any- 
where. So let’s build one. We can do it.” 

McLean was in doubt as to whether they 
could really build a safe canoe. Both he and 
Steve had seen Wahita and other Indians 
build and repair canoes, but he was aware 
that seeing a thing done is very diiferent from 
doing it yourself. However, he consented to 
try it. They tramped about a whole day in 
search of suitable birch trees, for birches 
large and smooth enough to yield bark for a 
canoe are not common everywhere. When 
they finally found the trees, they discovered 
that they were too late, the bark would no 
longer peel. It was easy enough to peel off 
small pieces, by the taking of which thought- 
less men and boys mutilate and make un- 
sightly so many birch-trees near towns and 


162 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


cities, but the large rolls needed for a canoe 
would not come off. 

Steve was much disappointed by their fail- 
ure. Now we shall have to keep on fishing 
from shore till the lakes freeze over,’^ he com- 
plained. ‘ ‘ I wanted to get out on the water. ’ ’ 

“You shall get out on the water, anyway, 
my lad,^’ replied his father. “We will build 
rafts and put sails on them. If we go to it 
right smart, we can build a raft in a day and 
have time to spare. 

They went at it the next day. While David 
worked hard cutting dry cedars, Steve pulled 
up and split long roots of black and white 
spruce and cut long strips of bark from 
young basswoods, for they had no spikes nor 
ropes for the building of their rafts. Articles 
of iron were scarce and expensive at Eed 
Eiver in those days and for many years later. 
Even thirty and forty years later, when long 
trains of two-wheeled ox-carts came every 
summer from Eed Eiver to St. Paul, the carts 
were built entirely of wood, including wheels 
and axles. 


ALONE IN THE FOEEST 163 


In three days of hard work father and son 
built three rafts, one on the home lake, and 
one each on a lake east and west of Lake 
Jessica. 

Now they could fish and sail about to their 
hearts’ content. When the wind was con- 
trary they used the paddles which they had 
cut from light dry cedar, which is by far the 
lightest wood in the northern forests. In 
shallow water they often used poplar push- 
poles, which they picked up from poles which 
the beavers had peeled and sent adrift, for 
on each one of the lakes they found several 
large beaver houses. 

A small canvas sail tied to a stout pole gave 
the rafts just the right speed for fishing, and 
frequently they caught fifteen or twenty good- 
sized pike and pickerel in a day, sometimes 
trolling and sometimes still-fishing from the 
raft. 

Both sailors rejoiced when they discovered 
in the western lake a large marsh of wild rice 
bearing an abundant crop. Wild rice is the 
great grain crop in the country of the north- 


164 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


ern lakes, but, like all wild crops, it is not al- 
ways abundant. The lakes may be too low 
or too high for a good crop, or the weather 
may be unfavorable. The plants grow best 
on a mud bottom where the water is from 
six inches to two feet deep. As soon as the 
grain begins to ripen, thousands of black- 
birds gather in the marshes, and after the 
grain has been shed, the wild ducks gather it 
from the bottom. But no matter how much 
is eaten by^blackbirds and ducks or gathered 
by Indians and white men, enough rice remains 
in the dark mud as seed for next year ; for 
wild rice does not grow from perennial root- 
stocks like bulrushes, cattails, pipestem reeds 
and the sharp-edged sedges, but it grows from 
the seed every spring just as wheat does or 
oats or corn. In July the long leaves may 
still float gently on the waves, but in Septem- 
ber, when the grain is ripe, the big stalks 
are often more than ten feet tall. 

Sailing, paddling, and poling their rafts 
was great fun for both father and son. It 
was hard work, too, and there never was a 


ALONE IN THE FOKEST 165 


day without wet feet. Sometimes the waves 
dashed over the raft, and at other times the 
sailors had to get wet in launching or landing 
their craft. But work and hardship only lent 
zest to their lives. Steve felt himself grow- 
ing stronger, and both felt the joy of an ac- 
tive outdoor life such as no modern physical- 
culture doctor can produce by his scientifically 
planned exercise. Their appetites needed no 
peptones nor predigested foods. Fish and 
game disappeared in large quantities as soon 
as cooked, and they did not smoke and dry 
nearly as many fish as they had planned to do. 

When they reached their camp in the eve- 
ning they put on dry shoes or moccasins and 
neither of them ever suffered from any kind 
of ache in spite of exposures and hardships. 
Their food consisted almost entirely of game 
and fish which they generally boiled in Indian 
fashion, so that they could drink the hot broth. 

As soon as the wild rice was ripe in Septem- 
ber they gathered enough of it so that they 
could eat some every day, and after that they 
needed much less fish and meat. 


166 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


The days went fast, because there was 
something to do every day; for a man, who 
must hunt and fish and gather wild fruit and 
grain enough to live on, generally has all the 
work he can do. The only days of rest were 
the Sundays, when they stayed in camp and 
took life easy and read and talked. Steve’s 
one regret was that he always fell asleep so 
quick in the evening that it was no use for his 
father even to start a story. 


CHAPTEE XV 


A WINTEB IN TEPEE AND DUGOUT 

B y the middle of September the wild 
ducks began to be thick on the lakes. 
All the young ducks could fly now, 
and the big wing-feathers of the old birds bad 
again grown to full size. On windy and rainy 
days hundreds of birds were constantly on 
the wing, passing from one lake and feeding- 
place to another, while on quiet, sunny days 
large flocks could be watched, feeding in the 
open water or along the rushes. 

Steve soon learned to recognize the mal- 
lards and redheads by their rather slow flight 
and large size, the pintails he could tell by 
their long necks and short pointed tails. The 
blue-winged teal, he learned, showed a white 
bar under the wing and flew exceedingly fast 
with softly whistling wings. They were the 
most numerous of all wild ducks, and some- 
i«7 


168 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


times passed over tlie tepee in flocks of two 
or three hundred. 

The beautiful wood-ducks which are now 
getting rare, were also quite common. Then 
there were some of the pretty green-winged 
teal, the smallest and swiftest of all our ducks, 
as well as buffleheads and spoonbills, which 
generally flew in pairs or small flocks. By 
seeing them often and by sharp watching and 
looking, Steve learned to recognize them all, 
both on the water and on the wing, which is 
much more difficult than knowing them in a 
bird-book or in a museum. 

In October several flocks of geese appeared 
on the lake as well as many large flocks of 
northern ducks, the scaups, or bluebills, as 
hunters call them. Add to these ducks and 
geese thousands of coots, or mud-hens, and 
one can imagine that the lakes were literally 
dotted with game birds of many kinds, not 
to count the thousands upon thousands of 
blackbirds which came from all directions to 
roost in the rushes at night. The two camp- 
ers estimated that fifty thousand blackbirds 


A WINTER IN TEPEE 


169 


came to the western lake every evening. 
From four o’clock till shortly after sunset 
they came in flocks that were sometimes a 
mile long. 

At first Steve found it hard to tell coots 
and ducks apart on the water, but he soon 
learned that all ducks looked more or less 
grayish or brownish, while the coots sitting 
on the water looked black and bobbed their 
heads as they swam about. 

‘‘It is now time,” remarked David one 
evening, as they were returning to camp wet, 
tired and hungry, from one of their trips on 
the western lake, “that we do some duck and 
geese hunting in earnest and lay in a supply 
for winter. We may not find any big game 
and we don’t know what luck we shall have 
fishing through the ice.” 

Thus far they had only secured a few 
ducks from time to time as they needed them 
for food, but early the next morning they be- 
gan to hunt in real earnest, and at sunset they 
returned to camp, both loaded with all the 
ducks and geese they could carry. For about 


170 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


two weeks they hunted in this way. After a 
good day’s hunting they remained in camp 
one day to clean and smoke the game. 

At the close of their hunt their cave looked 
like a provident farmer’s smoke-house after 
the hog-killing season, when it is filled clear 
up to the door with sausages, hams, and 
bacon. 

While many of the days were still warm, 
their cave was cool and airy, and it was filled 
with smoked ducks and geese hanging from 
poles under the low ceiling. They had 
smoked for winter use about two hundred 
large ducks, mallards, redheads, and canvas- 
backs, and fifty geese. 

The supply looked as if it ought to last 
them a year, but both knew well that a man 
coming to camp after a hard tramp on a cold 
winter day will eat a duck for a meal, espe- 
cially if he has little else to go with it. 

Eabbits were fairly common in the woods 
and they saw also many grouse, but they 
felt that they could not use their ammunition 
on such small and scattered game. 


A WINTER IN TEPEE 


171 


Big game seemed rather scarce. They had 
seen tracks of both bear and moose, but the 
animals themselves they had not seen, and in 
those days deer were seldom found so far 
north. 

About the beginning of November the lakes 
began to freeze over, and as they froze over 
clear, without snow, father and son had a few 
weeks of rare sport. 

Before the ice was safe, and the middle of 
the lake covered, Steve ‘ ‘ shied many a flat 
stone over the smooth black surface, and his 
dignified father, before he realized what he 
was doing, was vying with his young son in 
skipping the flat, smooth pebbles and was as 
happy as a boy when Steve shouted : 

‘ ‘ Hear them sing. Father I See them plump 
in!’’ and one who has ever listened to the 
strange music made by a stone sailing over 
thin, smooth ice will appreciate Steve’s joy at 
this rare and peculiar melody of winter. 

When the ice had thickened so that the 
stones no longer sang with the high, trem- 
bling pitch and no longer glided off a thin 


172 IN THE GKEAT WILD NOETH 


film into the rippling water, father and son 
explored its safety with long sticks, and then 
Steve invented another game. He and his 
father now enjoyed many a curling match on 
the glossy ice. Sometimes they tried to see 
who could send his rock the farther, some- 
times the aim was to send the rock the closer 
to a line marked on the ice. So much they 
enjoyed this improvised open-air game that 
they played it for hours at a time, forgetting 
the time of day, like schoolboys who miss 
the bell over their favorite sports. 

And it was well that they did not count the 
hours and the days, for they had a long winter 
and many a stormy day ahead of them in their 
voluntary exile. 

‘ ‘ Father, if we only had skates, if we only 
had skates!’’ Steve wished many a time. 
‘‘We would skate all day and see every comer 
of every lake around here. ’ ’ 

However, skates they had not, nor had they 
any means of making them. But when his 
father suggested that perhaps they could 
make an ice-boat, Steve danced with joy and 


A WINTER IN TEPEE 


173 


turned several somersaults although the 
ground was no longer soft. Out of a few 
poles and a piece of canvas they quickly built 
a crude ice-boat. It would not make sixty 
miles an hour, and it did not steer very well, 
hut it sailed and took them all over the lake. 

They even took it apart, carried the parts 
to both the eastern and the western lakes, and 
sailed all over those. 

In their walks over shallow water, both en- 
joyed the sight of the reddish-brown leaves of 
water-lilies and other plants that could be 
seen as clearly through the ice as if they had 
been growing in a glass tank. By lying down 
on the ice, Steve even discovered a few clams 
that had not yet crawled into deep water and 
a stray perch or pickerel glided away at the 
approach of the boy above him. Bowlders 
and pebbles and ripples in the sand were as 
plainly visible as if all had been placed in a 
vast aquarium. 

As the boy explorer drew away from shore, 
all these objects gradually disappeared with 
the increasing depth of the lake until the hot- 


174 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 

tom itself vanished so that it seemed to the 
lad that a sheet of glassy, black ice lay over 
a black, treacherous deep. These black, 
smooth lanes he was afraid to explore alone, 
although they seemed quite safe, for he could 
tell by the cracks that the ice was from four 
to six inches thick. But his father had told 
him: “Don’t take any chances on thin ice. 
It’s a fool’s game. Breaking through the ice 
in deep water is a dangerous accident. If the 
ice looks at all dangerous, try it with a long 
stick. A man who gets under the ice is lost.” 

Both father and son had noticed that their 
supply of game had rapidly diminished dur- 
ing the weeks they played and sailed on the 
lakes and both felt it was time to do something 
towards supplying their daily food. 

They decided to build a fish-house a rod 
or two out from the rushes, where the water 
was about twenty feet deep. It was not really 
a house, it was a pole-and-brush tepee, be- 
cause they had no boards and they could spare 
no blankets except a small piece for the door. 
When the fish-house was finished no light 


A WINTER IN TEPEE 


175 


came through the walls of it, but a soft light 
from the water shone through its ice floor, 
and after they had cut a large hole into the 
ice, they could see a wooden minnow to a 
depth of six feet. By playing this wooden 
minnow on a line, they speared many a big 
pickerel which came to grab the bait. 

During cold nights the water in the fish- 
house froze over, but as they opened the hole 
every morning the ice never grew very thick. 

About the middle of November, the weather 
became severe. Toward evening it began to 
snow and in the morning the black buffalo 
robe which was the bedspread of the two 
campers was covered with a blanket of pure, 
fluffy snow. 

^‘Oh, Father, this is great camping!’’ 
Steve exclaimed when he awoke and saw the 
snow. ‘‘We’re real Indians now. Father, 
if old Indian Jim can live all winter in a 
tepee, we can. Do you think, Father, old 
Jim is still catching owls'?” 

“Perhaps he is, laddie,” McLean an- 
swered, with a laugh, “but I can tell you for 


176 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


certain what we have to do to-day and to- 
morrow and next day. We have to cut wood. 
Winter is upon us, and the wood we have cut 
will not last us over a week. If we don^t get 
busy, we shall have to do as the Indian women 
do, and cut wood in a snow-storm.’’ 

For the next three days the sound of the ax 
rang merrily through the woods, and the hole 
in the fish-house was allowed to freeze over. 
On the south side of the tepee a clearing was 
started in the white birches. The straight 
white trunks, less than a foot thick, were cut 
and split into proper lengths to feed the camp- 
fire in the tepee or the cave. 

The best wood for a camp-fire in the north- 
ern forest is green white birch. It burns 
neither too slow nor too fast, it makes very 
little smoke, it does not shoot sparks among 
the blankets, but it leaves a good bed of hot 
coals and it is easy to cut. 

For their cooking-fires, the two campers cut 
up a good lot of small dry wood of any kind 
most easily obtained, willow and ironwood, 
oak, pine, and poplar. 


A WINTEE IN TEPEE 


177 


Any kind of large dry wood, of course, also 
burns well, but for a camp-fire it burns too 
fast and it is too difficult to cut. A man cut- 
ting dry oak or ironwood would be tired out 
before be had cut enough to last him over 
night, while green oak and ironwood burn 
only if mixed with dry wood or placed on a 
big fire. 

All the cone-bearing trees, pine, spruce, 
tamarack, fir, and cedar cut very easily, but 
they burn too fast and with a black smoke, 
and do not leave a good bed of coals, and one 
of them, the tamarack, shoots the red sparks 
in all directions. 

Dead birch is worthless at all times. It 
never dries in its jacket of waterproof 
bark, but decays within a few years into a 
useless pulp. 

For a camp-fire in the north, green white 
birch is the ideal wood, while for cooking the 
camper’s meals, any kind of dry sticks or 
small wood serves well. 

However, a man who would be happy in 
camp must take things as they come. All 


178 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


weather, all food, all wood must be good to 
him. If white birch is not handy, yellow birch 
is good, and if no birch is handy, pine, spruce 
and tamarack are good, and sometimes drift- 
wood cast upon river bank and lake shore, 
when it is handy and plentiful near camp, is 
the best. 

The two campers at Lake Jessica needed 
all the wood they had cut, and a good deal 
more, before ducks, geese, and blackbirds 
again passed over their camp. 

In December, winter began in earnest, and 
Steve was quite willing to move from the 
tepee into the cave. The tepee was now con- 
verted into a storehouse, where smoked fowl, 
fish, and game froze as brittle as the ice on 
the lake. 

During the next three months father and 
son spent many a day in the cave, while the 
storms raged over the forest with a dull con- 
tinuous roar. They talked to their hearts’ 
content and David read again a large part of 
his old Scotch Bible and Steve read again and 


A WINTER IN TEPEE 


179 


again the story of the shipwrecked youth in 
the Pacific until he knew the tale almost by 
heart. 

They had set a few traps for mink, lynx, 
and marten, and visiting these traps, hunting 
and fishing for food, and making short snow- 
shoe trips for the fun of it gave them enough 
to do. 

Nor were they without company from the 
wild creatures. Late in fall, a little striped 
chipmunk had built himself a nest and gone 
to sleep in a comer of their dugout, and they 
were careful not to disturb him. A small 
flock of Canada jays came to their camp every 
day and learned very quickly to behave with 
saucy impudence. The only food to which 
they did not help themselves was the meat in 
the kettle or frying-pan over the fire. 

Almost every evening at dusk two or three 
pretty brown deer-mice with large ears and 
big heady black eyes came foraging for scraps 
from the campers’ meal. 

Several big white rabbits were seen near the 
camp every day. ‘ ‘ We must not hunt those, ’ ’ 


180 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


McLean told Steve. ‘‘They are our friendly 
neighbors. ’ ’ 

The snowshoe rabbits had first been at- 
tracted by the brush of birches, jack-pines and 
poplars which the campers had felled. These 
northern hares eat practically every bush and 
tree of the forest, and when their food sup- 
ply was running short, Steve cut down a few 
poplars or jack-pines for them, and the next 
day they could generally be found crouching 
in the brush of the felled trees. 

On several occasions a porcupine came nos- 
ing around the camp. Porcupines are not 
very welcome camp visitors. They have a 
habit of eating up any box or hag that has 
been in contact with salt in any form, and 
they will even gnaw holes into doors and floors 
for the same reason. For protection they de- 
pend more on their coat of spines than on 
their wits. They are not fast runners, but 
when Steve poked one gently with a stick it 
took the hint and scampered back into the 
woods. 

Several large owls were heard hooting al- 


A WINTER IN TEPEE 


181 


most every night, and many a time Steve 
found the remains of rabbits that had care- 
lessly wandered too far from the protecting 
brush and had fallen victims to the fierce si- 
lent-winged robber of the forest. 

The big timber-wolves were also quite com- 
mon. Almost every night their weird howl- 
ing mingled with the hooting of the owls. 
Steve and his father saw them quite often, for 
in those days they were not as wild and wary 
as in our days of high wolf -bounties, of cheap 
traps and poison, and of high-power rifles. 
While they never threatened to attack the two 
lone campers, they often followed their trails, 
and neither father nor son ever went far from 
camp without carrying a gun. 

It was from a snowshoe trip to the eastern 
lake which Steve made alone in early March 
that he came near not returning. 

Big game had been scarce all winter, but as 
Steve walked along leisurely through a spruce 
swamp, examining a few mink-traps set near 
a small stream, he struck a fresh moose 
trail. 


182 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


His hunting instinct was afire at once and 
his imagination was fairly ablaze. 

‘‘What if I should get a moose all by my- 
self? Wouldn’t father and Wahita be sur- 
prised? I’d keep the big horns as long as I 
lived and we wouldn’t have to hunt rabbits 
and dangle a wooden minnow through the ice 
any more. Moose meat would he some real 
meat. It ’s like beef, W ahita says, ’ ’ and with- 
out further thought he took up the trail. 

An hour he followed like a hound on a 
fresh scent. Once he thought he heard the 
rubbing of the big, broad antlers against some 
brush. He followed another hour without 
seeing the moose, until suddenly the big bull 
arose a hundred yards to his right and 
crashed into a tamarack swamp. 

The wily old bull, who had been hunted be- 
fore, had curved back parallel to his trail and 
had lain down to watch for his pursuer. 

Steve cut across on a run and rushed into 
the thicket. The trees grew too close for a 
man on snowshoes. So he hung them on a 
tree and pursued in his moccasins. 


A WINTEE IN TEPEE 


183 


The moose, whose long legs serve the pur- 
pose of excellent stilts, both in a marsh and 
in deep snow, had passed quickly through 
the deep, loose covering, but Steve soon tired 
and had to sit down for a rest. 

He looked around a minute. Where was 
he? He knew that he had never been in this 
part of the country before. But in what di- 
rection had the big black bull led him? How 
far and how long had he followed the trail? 
He didn’t know. He had only thought of the 
moose and how glad and surprised his father 
would be when his young son rushed into 
camp and shouted : 

‘‘Father, IVe killed a big moose!” 

He reached into his pocket for his compass, 
to find in what direction the trail was leading. 

A hot flush passed all through him. He 
had left his compass in camp and he had also 
neglected to bring his flint, steel, and tinder. 
He had broken two important campers’ rules. 

“Always take your compass and your flint 
and steel when you leave camp.” Both 
Wahita and his father had impressed these 


184 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


rules on him, and he felt thoroughly ashamed 
of his carelessness. 

His conscience was a little easier when he 
assured himself that he had brought a good 
lunch of rabbit meat. Of course he would 
have to eat it frozen now, but that didn’t 
matter. He had good teeth, and frozen meat 
wasn’t so bad; he had eaten some before. 

He stood up to look around. And again he 
wondered how long and how far he had fol- 
lowed the giant wild beast. The sky was a 
dark gray all around and there was no clew 
to the position of the sun, the great compass 
of the world. A light snow was falling and 
the wind could be heard in the treetops. Was 
it getting dark? He had not noticed the 
snowfall, the wind and the fading of the light 
while he was following the trail. 

And now it struck him that he would not 
get the moose. He could not follow the trail 
any longer. It was high time to turn back, 
or night would overtake him far from camp. 
It was hard to give up the moose when he had 
been so close to it, but he had, by this time, be- 


A WINTER IN TEPEE 


185 


come enough of a woodsman to submit to the 
inevitable. 

Had he been an experienced big-game 
hunter, he would have known that stalking a 
moose which has been thoroughly frightened 
is a hopeless undertaking. 

Bitterly disappointed, he turned back. As 
he had no idea in what direction he was from 
camp, he was compelled to follow his trail 
back. He found his snowshoes, put them on, 
and could now travel at a good speed. 

Again and again he thought the lake ought 
to appear in view from the next hill, but there 
was always the same scene of pines, spruces, 
poplars, and tamaracks beyond the monoto- 
nous falls and rises of the ground. He had no 
recollection of ever having seen this desolate, 
wild country. And he had, in fact, not seen 
the country ; he had only seen the trail of the 
moose. 

To his horror, it was really getting dark 
and the snowfall and the wind were increasing. 
Several times he asked himself if he was on 
the right trail. He assured himself that he 


186 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


was, although wind and snow and the gather- 
ing darkness were fast obliterating the trail, 
which seemed interminably long. 

He increased his speed, but then he remem- 
bered that Wahita had said, ‘‘When you 
lose tepee, donT run. Sit down, think. If 
night comes, don’t get scared like deer; stop 
build fire, make a camp. Find tepee next 
day.” 

What if he should have to stay out over 
night? He could not build a fire. He had 
not even an ax to build a warm brush shelter. 
And worst of all, what would his father think? 

He had broken another camp rule. He had 
not told his father where he was going. His 
father might figure that he had gone to look 
at his mink-traps, hut they were three miles 
from camp. 

It was surely getting dark fast and the 
snowfall and the wind were increasing every 
minute. It was getting colder, too. If he did 
not reach the lake very soon he would have to 
camp on the trail in some thick woods till 
morning. 


A WINTER IN TEPEE 


187 


He heard some wolves howl in the distance 
up the wind and once more a hot flush rushed 
up his back and he determined to push on till 
he found the lake. 

“If I only reach the lake,^^ he said to him- 
self, “I know the way home.’’ 

He almost fell down a steep narrow ridge 
and struck an open space. What was this? 
Was the world bewitched by some Indian 
devil? He didn’t remember any open space 
along the whole trail. 

He stopped and looked around. 

Thank God ! He was on the lake. But the 
next moment all hope again vanished. It was 
dark now, so dark that he could not see fifty 
feet around him and in the open on the frozen 
lake the wind had risen to a blizzard that 
drove the stinging ice crystals into his face. 
He had to rub his eyes, for it felt as if his eye- 
lids were being glued together. 

How could he travel three miles in the dark- 
ness in the face of this storm without missing 
his direction? And there was that open lane 
of water that extended half-way across the 


188 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


lake ! A man who fell into that open lane on 
such a night as this was hopelessly lost. 

Again one of the warnings of his old Cree 
friend fairly rang in his ears. 

‘‘When you get caught in big storm, you 
stop. You make camp till big wind dies ! ^ ’ 

But where could he make a camp ? He had 
no flint and steel and no ax. Was he to 
freeze to death, or were the wolves going to 
get him, because just once he had forgotten a 
few simple camp rules? 

Perhaps he could find a camp if he could 
not make one. 

He groped his way up the bank a few hun- 
dred yards. It seemed a long time to his ex- 
cited mind, but at last he found the object of 
his search, a big deserted beaver-house. He 
had opened it in the faU to see the inside of a 
beavers^ den. There was a big room in it just 
as the old Cree had told them on Lake Winni- 
peg. 

He slipped off his snowshoes, scraped the 
snow out of the opening and out of the in- 
side. Then he broke an armful of spruce 


A WINTER IN TEPEE 


189 


brusli, stuck his snowshoes on top of the 
house, slipped inside and closed the opening 
with the brush. 

He had found a camp. 


CHAPTER XVI 


IN THE HOUSE OF THE BEAVEB PEOPLE 

T he camp in the beaver-house did not 
offer a soft bed, for the beavers 
just level off the pole floor with a 
little mud and dead vegetation. Much bed- 
ding would be useless, it would only become 
like so much soaked hay or straw and would 
soon be turned into muck, because every time 
a beaver steps out of his door he takes a 
plunge bath, and when he returns, he prob- 
ably shakes the big drops from his fur in the 
entrance. But we cannot be quite sure of 
this, for no man has ever seen just how a 
beaver behaves when he enters his house, be- 
cause the entrances are always under water. 

However, Steve had escaped from the ter- 
rible storm and the piercing cold. Had he 
not found some safe shelter he would have 
been compelled to walk about the greater part 

190 


THE BEAVEE PEOPLE 


191 


of the night to keep from freezing to death. 

As soon as he had arranged his pillow of 
brush, he stretched himself to find the most 
comfortable position. For a full-grown man 
the beaver den would have been a little too 
short, and a fat man might not have been able 
to squeeze into it at all, but a lad of 
Steve’s age and size could stretch himself at 
full length and could even rest on his elbow, 
but he could not sit up straight since the 
cavity was scarcely two feet high in the cen- 
ter. 

It was a shelter such as perhaps no boy in 
distress had ever discovered before, but 
Steve did not think of that. As he lay in the 
dark hole and listened to the deep soughing 
of the storm through the tree-tops, he felt 
that he had had a narrow escape from the 
horror of being lost and benumbed and of 
freezing to death in the arctic storm. It was 
strange how plainly he could hear the howl- 
ing, soughing, and roaring of the wind in 
his strange, dark lair. He even fancied that 
he could hear the soft swishing of the fine 


192 IN THE GREAT WILD NOETH 


snow, as it was being rolled over the bouse 
and was covering up the brush with which he 
had closed the opening. 

‘‘Won^t the wolves smell me and dig me 
outr’ he asked himself, and a chill of fear 
and terror crept over him. However, the 
next moment he remembered that wolves 
never go near anything that looks at all sus- 
picious, and he had stuck his snowshoes on 
top of the house so that the wolves would not 
come near him. 

And then he thought of his father, and the 
warm blood rushed to his head. He knew 
his father was now anxiously calling and 
searching for him and was alarmed for his 
safety. What a fool he had been to forget all 
the big rules of camping ! If he had only left 
a note telling his father where he had gone ! 

He almost yielded to the impulse of rush- 
ing out of the den calling for his father and 
firing his gun. But it would have been abso- 
lutely useless. His father could not possibly 
be near the beaver house yet, and even the 


THE BEAVER PEOPLE 


193 


sound of a gun could be heard in this storm 
only a short distance down the wind. 

He forgot that he was hungry and that he 
had pushed his lunch into a corner near his 
head, and, deeply ashamed and mortified at 
the worry he was causing his father, he 
sobbed himself to sleep. 

It is one of the great blessings of healthy 
childhood, that in its profound sleep the good 
angels drive away its troubles, big and little, 
real and fancied, and in the morning the tears 
of yesterday are forgotten in the sunshine 
and joys of to-day. 

On the hard floor in the strange dark room 
of the beaver people, Steve slept more 
soundly than thousands of pampered, 
spoiled, and fussed-over children in steam- 
heated apartments and under the care of 
ever-worried nurses and governesses. 

The first thing he knew again, was that 
something touched and shook him. He 
awoke with a start and a yell and grabbed his 
gun, for the thought flashed through his con- 


194 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


fused mind that the wolves had dug him out, 
and then he recognized his father ^s voice 
calling; ‘‘Come oot, laddie, come oot! 
Thank the Good Lord thee^re alive 

Like an animated spring, Steve shot out 
of his hole. 

“Oh, Father, youVe come,^^ he cried. “I 
— I crawled in here. The storm caught me. 
I — I followed the moose, I forgot alP’ — and 
then his voice broke. 

And the big man put his arm around the 
little fellow’s neck and, pressing the lad’s 
head close to his side, said with an unsteady 
voice : 

“Don’t thee blubber, lad; don’t thee blub- 
ber. Come, we’ll build a fire under the lee 
of the bank and we’ll have some hot tea and 
goose-breast for breakfast.” 

The storm had let up, and father and son 
soon had a fire going, which melted a deep 
hole into the snow, and, together with the hot 
tea, warmed up the chilled, stiff joints of the 
lad who had spent the night in quarters, 
which, although they protected his hands and 



“Come oot, laddie, come oot!” — Page 194 






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THE BEAVER PEOPLE 


195 


feet from freezing, were not comfortable nor 
really warm without blankets. 

Steve related in detail the story he had at 
first told in a few broken sobs, and his father 
told how he had become thoroughly alarmed 
about the boy’s safety, when with nightfall 
the storm had increased to great violence 
and Steve had not returned. Feeling sure 
that the boy was lost or that some accident 
had befallen him, the father had made his 
way carefully to the eastern lake where he 
knew Steve had set some mink-traps. 

It was so dark in the forest that McLean 
had to follow the trail by feeling for it with 
his feet. After he had in this way reached 
the lake, he picked his way slowly along the 
northern shore, where trees and bank offered 
some protection from the north wind. All 
the time he kept calling for Steve, and several 
times he fired his gun, although it was very 
difficult to load and fire the old-style flint- 
lock gun in such a storm. 

After they had related to each other the 
experiences of the day, they made their way 


196 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


to camp without difficulty. That evening 
both father and son crept under the blankets 
when the northern woodpeckers, nuthatches, 
and chickadees sought their sleeping-holes. 

Several more violent storms in late March 
followed the one in which both father and 
son nearly lost their lives; but Steve had, 
at last, learned his lesson. Never again was 
he caught away from camp without a com- 
pass, steel, flint, and tinder, and both camp- 
ers were careful not to be caught in a storm 
far away from camp. They seldom sepa- 
rated, for both remembered with something 
like horror the agony each of them had suf- 
fered the time Steve followed the moose trail 
and had to seek refuge in the beaver house. 

Early in April a sudden change seemed to 
come into the air. In sheltered places the 
snow began to melt a little bit ; several of the 
winter birds began to call to each other, and 
both father and son thought they could in 
some vague manner smell spring. 

Old Winter indeed seemed to have blown 
and snowed himself tired, but in the shaded 


THE BEAVER PEOPLE 


197 


woods the snow showed no signs of melting, 
and the lakes lay as dead and frost-bound as 
if the ice, a yard thick, would never melt. 

But then the wind turned south and blew 
from the south day and night. It did not 
seem to be really warm, but it had a magic ef- 
fect upon ice and snow. Even in the timber, 
the thick white blanket became soggy and the 
white, glaring surfaces of the lakes changed 
to a dull watery gray, and, when Steve cut a 
hole into the soft ice, it quickly filled with 
water, like a well dug in gravel. 

In a few days the ice had melted a few 
feet away from the shore. And then it went 
fast. The narrow hand of open water 
rapidly widened into a black lane, and within 
a few days, a margin of dark open water, a 
hundred yards wide, ran all around the lakes, 
and the ice-floes in the middle of the lakes 
shifted back and forth with the changes in 
the wind, and the waves began to beat and 
wash against the thin edges, eating away a 
hundred or more feet in a day. 

Then came a strong northwest wind which 


198 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


piled white walls of ice along the southern 
shores, while in front of them on the water, 
lay the gray slushy ice. A few days later the 
wind shifted again to the south and Steve 
said, ‘‘Father, to-morrow wedl see the ice- 
wall on the northern shore.’’ 

They went to look for it, but it was not 
there. The south wind had broken up the 
soft ice-floes, the waves of the rapidly warm- 
ing surface and the warm south wind had 
eaten up the ice during the night, — the lakes 
were open. Spring had come. No, it felt 
as if summer had begun. Heavy clothing be- 
came unendurable, the faces of the two camp- 
ers were reddened by the bright, hot sun, and 
they moved hack into the airy tepee. 

It was now near the end of April. Ducks, 
geese, and blackbirds had returned; in the 
brush near open places sang innumerable 
juncoes and woodland sparrows, and the wil- 
low-bushes, covered with fragrant catkins, 
dotted the vast brown swamps with patches of 
old-cream and soft yellow, and on the willow 


THE BEAVER PEOPLE 


199 


catkins swarmed the almost noiseless little 
wild bees, that always emerge from tbeir 
secret hiding-places as soon as spring has 
painted patches of cream and gold over the 
solitudes of dull brown northern swamps. 

Within two weeks the aspect of the forest 
had changed from winter to summer, and 
Steve and his father might now, at almost any 
time, leave their winter camp and go to meet 
Wahita under the big elm on Red River. 

Would he be there? What had happened 
at Fort Douglas? And what would they de- 
cide to do? Would they stay at Red River 
or would they go back to the States? If they 
went back to the United States, how should 
they go? By way of Lake Superior and 
Fort Williams, or by way of the Red and the 
Minnesota Rivers past the present site of 
Fort Snelling and St. Paul? Perhaps they 
might then go down the Mississippi as far as 
St. Louis, at that time the only city of much 
importance above New Orleans. It was at 
that period a frontier village of about ten 


200 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


thousand inhabitants, and was a great fur- 
trading center and outfitting-post for the 
west. 

The great expedition of Lewis and Clark, 
in search of an overland route to the Pacific, 
started from St. Louis in 1804. Through 
this expedition it became known that the 
head-waters of the Missouri and other rivers 
were immensely rich in beavers and other 
fur-bearing animals, and for fifty years nu- 
merous expeditions started for the Rocky 
Mountains in search of beaver. These fur- 
hunters were hardy and adventurous men 
like the gold-hunters of later years. A few 
found the fortune they sought and returned 
to civilization with a wealth of furs, but 
many, perhaps the majority, of the early ad- 
venturers, never came back. They were the 
advance guard of the white race invading the 
wilderness, and the losses in their ranks were 
heavy. Accidents, disease, and Indians cut 
them otf in large numbers. 

At Oxford House, Norway House, at Red 
River, and even at York Factory, McLean and 


THE BEAVER PEOPLE 


201 


Steve had heard of the great beaver streams 
in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and of 
St. Louis, the great fur town on the Missis- 
sippi. For among fur-traders and trappers 
in those days, the reports of good heaver 
countries spread like news of rich placer dis- 
tricts in the gold-fever days. 

Steve and his father had talked over all 
these matters many a time as they sat before 
the fire in their cave on the long winter eve- 
nings and on many a stormy day. 

Now they were both getting impatient to 
return to Red River and meet Wahita. 

By the middle of May, when the country 
was dry enough for travel, they started east, 
each with a pack of blankets, their guns, a lit- 
tle ammunition, a few furs, and food for a 
few days. 

Their tepee and the cave they left as they 
had used them. ‘‘Some Cree hunter will 
make good use of them,’’ they said. 

When after a few days they approached the 
big elm, they saw Wahita’s tepee. In front 
of it sat the old Indian. He recognized his 


202 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOKTH 


friends a long way off and rose to meet them. 

‘‘Father/’ remarked Steve, “he walks as 
if he had lots of news for us.” 


CHAPTEE XVII 


WAHITA IN TROUBLE 

S TEVE was not mistaken. Wahita had 
much news and big news. 

Lord Selkirk he told them had sent 
a hundred soldiers from Fort Williams. A 
white Chippewa, Shaw-shaw-Wabenasa, 
whose real name was John Tanner, had 
guided the soldiers in the midst of winter 
from Eainy Lake to Pubbe-kwa-wonga, the 
Lake of the Sandhills and then across the big 
muskeg carrying-place to Eed Eiver. 

Tanner and some of the soldiers had made 
wooden steps, ladders of poles, and had 
climbed over the walls of Port Douglas on a 
dark stormy night and had made prisoners of 
all the Northwesters in the fort. 

Lord Selkirk himself was now at Fort 
Douglas, and had brought with him a big 
judge. His name was Coltman, and he was 
to punish all who had done wrong and was to 

203 


204 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


see that the Northwesters and the Hudson 
Bay men did no more fighting. The settlers 
had come back from Norway House and were 
building their houses and making gardens 
and fields. 

Wahita paused and made some supper for 
his white friends, hut after supper, when his 
pipe was lit, he had more big news to tell. 

The white people had fought a big battle 
in their own country, where the big ships 
come from. The English had captured the 
big French war-chief. They had put him on 
a big ship and had taken him to a little island 
in the big sea. They had told him to stay 
there and never go on the war-path again. 
They had taken away all his ships and canoes 
and had placed soldiers on the island to watch 
him, for he was a big war-chief and would 
fight again if he ever got back to his own 
country. 

Steve and his father learned later that this 
was Wahita ’s account of the battle of Water- 
loo and the exile of Napoleon to St. Helena, 
which had happened just two years before. 


WAHITA IN TKOUBLE 


205 


The settlement on Red River was, however, 
still in a precarious condition. The settlers 
had indeed returned, but they were all mis- 
erably poor and heavily in debt to Lord Sel- 
kirk and the Hudson Bay Company. They 
had no cattle nor horses, no plows nor 
wagons. 

Moreover, they were almost starving, de- 
pending for food on the fish and small game 
they could catch, and on the stores of the 
Hudson Bay Company. 

Indians, half-breeds, and whites were even 
now preparing to go on a great summer hunt 
after buffalo, and it was clear that next win- 
ter the settlers would again have to go to 
Pembina to hunt buffalo or to Norway House, 
where, in Playgreen Lake and other waters, 
fish were very abundant. 

Wahita made his terse comment on the 
situation : 

‘‘Settlers in bad fix,’^ said he. “No oxen, 
no horses, no pigs, no sheep. No eat like 
white men, no eat like Indians, but starve like 
Indians. All very bad mess.’’ 


206 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


He seemed to have something on his mind 
that troubled him very much. In the day- 
time he watched the preparations that were 
being made for the great buffalo hunt, while 
in the evening he sat and smoked in silence 
with a far-away look in his black eyes. 

To Stevens question when he would go back 
to Hudson Bay he answered briefly, ‘‘Don’t 
know. May be, not for a long time.” 

One evening, when he returned to the tepee 
quite late, he seemed to be especially troubled 
in mind. 

At other times he would tell of the things 
he had heard and seen, but on this evening he 
ate in silence the supper of bacon, fish, and 
hot tea, which Steve placed on the mat for 
him. He was very fond of tea, but had been 
without it for some time ; now, when McLean 
also offered him some tobacco which he had 
bought at the fort that day, he unburdened 
his troubled mind to his friends. 

“Squaw will say,” he began, “I’m big 
fool. ‘You are old man,’ she says, ‘but you 
go hunt much. You go to Red River, you 


WAHITA IN TROUBLE 207 

no stay in tepee in Cree country and catch 
rabbit and caribou.’ 

‘You are big fool,’ she will say, ‘you are 
old man, but you want to ride horse, you 
want to hunt buffalo. May be Blackfeet will 
find you and catch you again and cut your 
head off. You run away once. You no run 
away again.’ ” 

After he had smoked awhile he explained 
the real meaning of his rather disjointed 
references to his squaw, to buffaloes, horses, 
and Blackfeet. 

When he had seen the preparations for the 
buffalo hunt an uncontrollable desire had 
seized him once more to race after the big 
shaggy beasts and share in the excitement of 
a great hunt, as he had done many times 
when he was young and lived among the war- 
like and buffalo-hunting Blackfeet. His life 
in the Cree country had been uneventful, and 
the passion for action had seized him. 

“I am old,” he explained, “but I can run. 
I can ride and shoot, and I can fight if the 
Blackfeet find us. 


208 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


‘Hf I come back I bring squaw fine red 
blanket. Silk handkerchiefs, lots of beads 
for moccasins, big beads around neck, new ax, 
and lots of needles. 

‘‘She scolds. She says to me, ‘You are big 
fool to go in Blackfeet country.’ She takes 
things, she smiles, and I stay home in Cree 
country. 

“May be Blackfeet kill me. Squaw cry 
much. May be say, ‘Wahita was good man, 
but was big fool to go and get killed.’ She 
go and live in tepee with son.” 

Steve was at once wildly interested in 
Wahita ’s last buffalo hunt and before the 
camp-fire was allowed to go out, the three 
friends had agreed to join the great hunt to- 
gether, for, in reality, McLean had become as 
much interested in the proposed big hunt as 
Steve and Wahita. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


THE GREAT BUFFALO HUNT 

I T was decided that the three friends 
should join one of the hunting parties 
which were to start for the western 
plains by way of Pembina. 

Pembina is now a small town on the Red 
River in the present state of North Dakota. 
It is located near the junction point of 
Minnesota, North Dakota and Manitoba, and 
from the beginning of the Selkirk settlement 
until about 1845, it was the great rendezvous 
of the buffalo hunters, for west and southwest 
of Pembina immense herds of these wild cat- 
tle blackened the plains. 

In June 1840 an expedition left Pembina, 
consisting of more than fifteen hundred 
people, counting men, women and children; 
white, Indian, and half-breed. This great 
hunting party was provided with twelve hun- 
dred carts, one thousand horses, six hundred 

209 


210 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


oxen, and five hundred noisy and hungry dogs 
also joined in the great war against the wild 
cattle. 

The expedition returned to Fort Douglas 
with more than one million pounds of pemmi- 
can and dried meat. For this amount of 
‘‘plains provisions^’ about six thousand buf- 
falo carcasses would he needed. It is, how- 
ever, well known that not more than one-third 
of the animals killed were ever utilized, which 
would bring the total number of animals 
slaughtered by this one expedition up to 
eighteen thousand. 

These figures show why the butfalo herds 
rapidly diminished after wasteful hunters 
with firearms could reach the buffalo country. 

The party which Steve and his father and 
Wahita joined in the summer of 1817 was 
much smaller. It consisted of only about 
twenty-five hunters, Indians, whites, and 
half-breeds, the Indians being in the major- 
ity. Each hunter was riding as good a horse 
as he had been able to secure. Steve and 


THE GREAT BUFFALO HUNT 211 


McLean had recovered the ponies they rode 
to Lake Jessica. Quite a number of extra 
horses were taken along, but no carts, for in 
those days the few settlers that had returned 
from Norway House had no oxen. Moreover, 
the members of this expedition expected to 
penetrate far west into the Blackfeet coun- 
try where they might encounter hostile In- 
dians. For this reason they did not take 
their families, but traveled very much like an 
Indian war-party. Two servants of the Hud- 
son Bay Company went for the purpose of 
looking up the possibilities of establishing 
trading-posts in the Blackfeet country. 
Steve and his father, like most of the men, 
went for the love of adventure, and Wahita 
went, as he said, to see once more the great 
hunting-grounds of the Blackfeet before he 
returned to the big swamps of Hudson Bay 
and became an old man like Jim Seegush. 

The party traveled westward by easy 
stages till they came within fifty miles of the 
junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone Riv- 
ers. They only hunted enough to provide 


212 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


themselves with food, and most of them grew 
quite careless about watching for hostile In- 
dians. They figured that they were now too 
far west for the Sioux and too far east for 
the Blackfeet. From a hill in this region the 
plains appeared black with buffalo. 

McLean asked Wahita how many there 
were, but Wahita looked wild-eyed at the dis- 
tant black masses and just replied : 

‘‘Many, many, many! More than little 
trees in the Cree forests. Many, many, 
many! CanT count them.” 

The next day the hunters made a great run 
for buffalo. 

Each man dashed into the herd, picked out 
the fattest animals and killed as many as 
he could. Most of the hunters carried sev- 
eral halls in their mouths. After they had 
fired, a quantity of powder was poured into 
the barrel, a ball dropped on top of it, and 
again, the hunter rushing at full speed dis- 
charged his gun at close range at a selected 
young hull or cow. 

When the hunt was over, it was found that 



Each man dashed into the herd. — Page 212 








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THE 'GREAT BUFFALO HUNT 213 

the hunters had followed the madly fleeing 
animals for more than two miles. Some of 
them had killed more than a half a dozen buf- 
faloes. Steve and his father thought they 
had each killed one, but this being their first 
experience in a regular buffalo run, neither 
of them could find his game when the race 
was over. The horses they rode were not ex- 
perienced buffalo runners and had become 
uncontrollable from the stampede of the buf- 
faloes and the firing, shouting, and yelling of 
the Indians. 

Wahita had killed five, and he rode hack 
and picked out his game as easily as if he had 
put his own flag near each animal. All the 
other hunters seemed to he able to find and 
identify their own game without any difficulty. 

Steve and his father were so much sur- 
prised at this that they asked Wahita how it 
was done. 

Wahita thought a minute as if it were a 
hard thing to explain ; then he answered : 

White men write. Each says he knows 
his writing. Other white men say they know 


214 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


it. It is all scribble to Indian. White men 
learned to write, Indians didnT; Indians 
learned to hunt buffalo, my white brother and 
my white son didnT.’’ 

The great hunt had not been finished with- 
out accident. 

One man had fallen with his horse and a 
wounded and maddened bull had gored him to 
death. Another man, a little unskilful in the 
management of his horse, had had his mount 
killed under him. The rider had fallen be- 
tween the horns of the attacking bull and the 
frightened and angry buffalo had tossed the 
man back like a football. The scared man 
had landed on the back of another buffalo, 
but except for a few bruises, he had escaped 
unhurt. One of the white hunters had lost 
both his horse and his saddle. The horse was 
killed by a fall and before the rider could 
take off the saddle a mad cow that had lost 
her calf attacked the struggling horse. In 
some way her horns became entangled in the 
saddle and a moment later she was seen rac- 
ing madly away with the saddle stuck on her 


THE GREAT BUFFALO HUNT 215 


head. The man, although badly bruised and 
limping, had escaped without broken hones. 
He and others who had met with more or less 
ludicrous mishaps were the butt of many 
jokes and gibes when the hunters assembled 
in camp. Everybody was happy and there 
was much feasting, dancing, and singing in 
camp. 

During the next few days the hunters re- 
mained in camp busily engaged in drying and 
smoking the meat, and although each man 
made about a hundred pounds of dried meat, 
as much as the extra horses could conven- 
iently carry, a great deal of good meat was 
wasted. 

The hunters had killed more animals than 
they could quickly care for in the warm sum- 
mer weather, and of many of the older ani- 
mals only the tongue was taken, the whole big 
carcass being left to be devoured by the 
hordes of hungry wolves and coyotes that 
were seen every day and could be heard 
howling every night. 

The party having secured plenty of dried 


216 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


meat, it was decided to push rapidly up the 
banks of the Yellowstone for a few hundred 
miles without stopping to hunt. 

Wahita was not pleased with this decision. 

‘Ht is a big river,’’ he said, ‘‘all the way to 
mountains. Will float plenty fur-hoats. We 
don’t need to go and see. 

“We go much farther; may be Blackfeet 
will find us. We are too big to hide, not big 
enough to fight much. May be Blackfeet kill 
two, three to-day, kill two, three to-morrow. 
By and by kill us all. None of us get back to 
Red River. We are many days away now.” 

When Steve and McLean both told him 
that they desired very much to go with the 
party and see more of the new country he 
tried to persuade them not to go farther. 

He had learned, he said, since they left Red 
River that the hearts of the Blackfeet were 
full of hatred toward the whites. Ten sum- 
mers before, may be longer, two big white 
chiefs marched soldiers through their coun- 
try. Up to that time the Blackfeet had never 
seen a white man. One of the soldiers killed 


THE GREAT BUFFALO HUNT 217 


a Blackfoot and all the warriors of the tribe 
had sworn to kill every white man that came 
into their country. 

This was the Indian version of an en- 
counter that took place between a soldier of 
the Lewis and Clark expedition and a Black- 
feet Indian, in which the Indian was killed. 

McLean and Steve did not attach sufficient 
importance to the story, and persuaded Wa- 
hita to go with the party into the country of 
the hostile Blackfeet. 


CHAPTEE XIX 

THE HUNTER PARADISE 

W AHITA had often told of the 
Blackfeet country as the best 
of all game countries Manitou 

had made. 

‘‘All animals live there,” he had related, 
“and very many are good to eat and their 
skins are good, so the Blackfeet are seldom 
hungry and always have skins for their tepees 
and they have many, many horses. 

“Eeneuah, the black-horned buffaloes are 
many. Auatuyi, wags-his-tail, the deer, hides 
in the timber near the rivers ; ponoka, the elk, 
calls aloud where the mountains come down 
to the plain, and there are big gray bears and 
many black bears that are smaller. On the 
streams live many sis-stukki, cut-the-trees, 
the beavers, and in the forests of the moun- 
tains bellow the big moose. 

218 


THE HUNTER PARADISE 219 


When yon ride over the plains you see 
many antelope, that can run very fast and 
can make signals with the white hairs on their 
rump. 

‘‘The Blackfeet country is the best land for 
hunters I ^ ^ 

Steve and his father saw now that Wahita 
had told the truth, for never before had they 
seen so much game, or so great a variety. 

On the Yellowstone they found beavers 
very numerous, and they passed several cot- 
tonwood trees, three feet in diameter, which 
the beavers had cut down. 

The whole aspect of the country was differ- 
ent from anything that Steve and McLean had 
ever seen. 

There were no dense forests and no 
swamps as in the Cree country, and there was 
no thick and tall green grass as in the Red 
River Valley. Fine groves of broad-topped 
cottonwoods lined the banks of the Yellow- 
stone and its many tributaries. In the Cree 
country almost every stream flows between 
marshy banks. In this country there were 


220 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


no large marshes, and the numerous tribu- 
taries could be forded almost anywhere. 

On dry uplands grew the short pale-green 
bunch-grass and buffalo-grass, but it was not 
even pale-green now; it was almost brown. 
It was, in fact, hay cured on the stem, but the 
horses liked it and kept in good condition on 
it. On some very dry slopes the grass was 
very thin, but a shrub with small grayish- 
green leaves always covered such areas. 
Steve tried to pull up some of the stalks, but 
found that the roots grew deep into the 
ground where they could touch moist soil. 
When the horses walked breast-high through 
a reach of this sage-brush, large gray birds 
resembling prairie-chickens often rose with a 
noisy whirring flight. 

Wahita, who took great pleasure in ex- 
plaining to his white friends everything about 
this new country, called them sage-hens. 

‘‘They have plenty of good meat on their 
breasts and legs, but it tastes like sage, much 
like sage ; but they are as good as the spruce- 


THE HUNTEE^S PARADISE 221 


hens of the Cree country that eat the strong- 
scented leaves of the tamarack and the 
spruce,” he explained. 

After camping a few times among some 
sage-brush, Steve learned that everything 
which comes in touch with sage-brush for a 
night will smell or taste of sage for a long 
time. 

Along the headwaters of the small streams, 
and along dry runs and gullies grew a tall 
thorny hush with silvery-gray leaves and an 
abundance of pretty orange-red berries, but 
when Steve tasted them he made a wry face 
and spit them out. 

Wahita laughed at him and remarked: 
^^Butfalo berries not good now. Next moon, 
when they are very ripe, they are good. 
Now they pull your mouth like green choke- 
cherries.” 

Such was the country of the Blackfeet from 
the mouth of the Yellowstone westward. All 
the big game roamed there in abundance be- 
cause the grass of the dry plains furnished 


222 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


good pasturage and the timber along the 
streams offered sufficient shelter at all sea- 
sons. 

The Blackfeet country was indeed the 
hunters^ paradise in those days. But there 
was another thing that made traveling and 
hunting and camping in the region so delight- 
ful : there were no mosquitoes, that unspeak- 
able pest of all those regions of the earth 
from the tropics to Greenland, wherever 
marshes, sluggish streams, and lakes abound. 
That miserable insect which makes a vast 
stretch of country from Labrador to Alaska 
practically uninhabitable during the summer 
months, the great summer plague of Red 
River and of the whole Cree and Chippewa 
countries, was absent. There were no mos- 
quitoes, and man and beast could eat and rest 
in peace. Such was the country of the Black- 
feet. 

‘^Why did Manitou make mosquitoes?^’ 
Steve had once asked Wahita. 

do not know why he made them, but he 
made them good creatures. Long ago the 


THE HUNTEE^S PARADISE 223 


mosquitoes and the flies drank only the honey 
of the flowers and the water out of the moss. 
Once Manitou had a quarrel with Matchi 
Manitou, the Bad Spirit, and Matchi Mani- 
tou taught the flies and mosquitoes to drink 
blood because he thought in that way he could 
kill all the people and animals Manitou had 
made. But Manitou shortened the lives of 
all mosquitoes, flies and bugs, and made the 
winters so cold that most of them freeze to 
death.’’ 

It was quite natural that all the members 
of the party should be desirous of staying for 
some time in a country where every kind of 
game was plentiful and where grass, good 
water, wood, and shelter were also abundant, 
with no mosquitoes to worry men and horses. 

But Wahita began to feel uneasy for the 
safety of the party. 

^‘We are now many days’ travel from Red 
River,” he counseled. ‘‘We are not a large 
force and have not many horses. If a large 
party of Blackfeet finds us, I am afraid they 


224 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


will follow ns for many days and kill many of 
us before we reach our own country. And 
if many Blackfeet come to hunt and camp be- 
tween us and our own country, we may have 
to scatter or flee to the mountains and then 
many of us will never reach home.” 

By this time the party had traveled about 
fifty miles up the Powder River and were en- 
camped on its westernmost bend, in the pres- 
ent county of Custer in Montana. 

It was agreed upon Wahita’s warning that 
the hunters should rest here three or four 
days, while Wahita, Steve, and McLean rode 
another day’s journey toward the Big Horn 
Mountains where Wahita had camped and 
hunted many years ago, while he lived with 
the Blackfeet. 

‘‘You watch all the time, day and night,” 
Wahita warned the hunters. “If not, Black- 
feet may surprise you, steal your horses, and 
kill many of you, may be all of you. ’ ’ 

Wahita and his two friends then traveled 
up the Powder River until they came well 
within the foothill country where the beauti- 


THE HUNTER PARADISE 225 


fill open groves of yellow pine invite the 
hunter and camper. But Wahita was rest- 
less and ill at ease. 

“I fear that they will not watch, he ex- 
pressed himself in the evening as he leaned 
in his blanket against the trunk of a big pine. 
‘‘They have grown careless. They say 
Blackfeet are far away, near the big moun- 
tains. May he they are, may be they are 
not.’^ 

Both Steve and McLean would have liked 
very much to explore the country clear to the 
rim rock of the mountains, where the streams 
come down roaring canyons, but the old Cree 
seemed to live under a foreboding of danger, 
so they started back after the second night 
out. 

Toward evening they came within sight of 
the camping place. As if by a common im- 
pulse, all three stopped their horses and gazed 
intently toward the camp-site. The tepees 
were gone. No smoke arose; neither man 
nor beast was to he seen. 

They tied their horses and crept toward the 


226 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


place, crawling on all fours for the last two 
hundred yards. 

The tepees had been burned. They saw 
several horses, but they lay stretched out 
dead. Three dark objects they could also dis- 
cern lying near one of the burned tepees. 
They had seen enough. The Blackfeet had 
attacked and evidently surprised the camp. 
Several horses and men had been killed. 
How many had escaped it was impossible to 
tell. The three scouts were afraid to inves- 
tigate any farther for fear of some concealed 
enemy. 

Big fool hunters,’’ Wahita muttered; 
‘ ‘ they did not watch ! ’ ’ 


CHAPTEE XX 


THE CAMP NEAR THE RIM ROCK 

T he three friends hurried to their 
horses and rode back up the river for 
a mile before they made camp. But 
this night they built no fire, and they tethered 
their horses for fear of losing them. 

The next day they did some careful scout- 
ing, and found the country below full of 
Blackfeet. From well-concealed positions 
they could see several large camps and sev- 
eral large herds of ponies. 

To follow now on the trail of the escaped 
hunters, if indeed any of them had gotten 
away, would have been madness. The three 
friends were cut off, and the only thing they 
could do was to keep from being discovered 
by the hostile Blackfeet, and watch their op- 
portunity for getting away. When such an 
opportunity would come, it was impossible to 
say. 


227 


228 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


McLean and Wahita realized that they 
were six hundred miles from the nearest 
white settlement at Red River and that per- 
haps they would never get back. To St. 
Louis, where McLean had often thought he 
would like to go, the distance was over a 
thousand miles. It would he easy enough to 
build a boat or a raft and float down the Yel- 
lowstone and the Missouri, but it would be 
impossible to travel that distance without 
falling into the hands of hostile Indians. 

For a white man who is impatient and re- 
bels against fate it was a hard situation, and 
many times did McLean wish that he had 
never joined that foolish band of buffalo- 
hunters. In these moments, the stoic indif- 
ference and apparent contentment of the old 
Indian made McLean feel that he wanted to 
apply all the favorite strong terms of Wahita 
to the old man himself. 

There he sat, smoking his old pipe filled 
with tobacco and kinnikinnick as calmly and 
happily as if he were sitting in front of the 


THE CAMP NEAR RIM ROCK 229 


tepee on the Assiniboin and had his grand- 
children clambering about him. 

‘‘Confound the old fellow!^’ thought Mc- 
Lean. “Here we are cut off and condemned 
to be scalped by the Blackfeet any day and 
that old brown stump sits and smokes and 
dreams as if he were looking forward to the 
event with real inward pleasure ! ’ ’ 

“What are we going to do, Wahita?^’ he 
finally broke out. “We can’t stay forever in 
this God-forsaken wilderness!” 

The old Cree kept on smoking for awhile, 
and a faint smile passed over his dark fea- 
tures. Then he replied with the dignity 
which he assumed only on important occa- 
sions. 

“Anything goes wrong, white man swears, 
kicks things around, makes a big fuss. No 
good ; things wrong anyhow ! 

“This is a good country, plenty of game, 
plenty of water, plenty of wood, no mosqui- 
toes. We keep away from Blackfeet. Some 
day, may be, we get back to Red River.” 


230 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


As for Steve, he didnT care; as long as his 
father and Wahita were with him, he whs 
satisfied, and he agreed with Wahita that this 
was a good country. There was always 
plenty to occupy his time. He learned to 
stalk elk and antelope and the black-tailed 
deer. He watched the antics of gophers and 
prairie dogs, and the chattering of the black- 
and-white magpies. He watched the golden 
eagles soar thousands of feet above the foot- 
hills, tiU their immense pinions looked no 
bigger than the wings of a sparrow. He saw 
both black bears and grizzlies but Wahita had 
told him to keep out of the way of the griz- 
zlies. 

In those days the grizzly was king of the 
plains and foothills and feared neither man 
nor beast, for the Indian hunter armed only 
with bow and arrow, was no match for the 
shaggy king of brutes. 

McLean was in favor of trying to get 
through or past the camp of the Blackfeet, 
but Wahita would not consent to this plan. 

‘‘The Blackfeet,’’ he argued, “are mad at 


THE CAMP NEAR RIM ROCK 231 


the whites. Some of their men were surely 
killed in the fight with the hunters, because 
the hunters all had guns and most of the 
Blackfeet have no guns because they are too 
far away from the traders. They are very 
angry now, and if they find our tracks they 
will work very hard to overtake us, and if 
they find us they will surely kill us. No, we 
must not travel through the Blackfeet coun- 
try now ; it is too dangerous. ’ ^ 

‘‘But where shall we go and what are we to 
do? We cannot stay here always. 

“To-morrow we shall travel up the river 
and go near the place where the mountains 
begin. There we will make a camp and stay 
till the Blackfeet have left and have gone to 
the western part of their country.’’ 

This plan was carried out. For several 
days the three friends traveled up-stream till 
they reached the open forests of yellow pine 
in the foothills and could plainly see the dark 
forests of lodge-pole pines on the slopes of 
the Big Horn Mountains. 

“Here we stay,” said Wahita, “and I think 


232 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


we stay till tlie geese fly north again. I know 
that the Blackfeet will camp this fall and win- 
ter near the month of the Yellowstone, so we 
cannot go hack. In spring, if they find no 
more whites coming into their country, they 
will go hack toward the western mountains.’^ 

McLean did not at all like the idea of liv- 
ing another winter in the wilderness, hut 
there was nothing else to do hut to submit to 
the inevitahle. 

As he thought the matter over, he saw 
clearly that even here their position was ex- 
tremely dangerous ; he therefore proposed to 
Wahita that they huild a stockade like those 
enclosing the Hudson Bay posts. 

‘Ht is a good plan,’’ said Wahita, and they 
set to work at once. Slender straight yellow 
pines were abundant, and Steve thought it 
was lots of fun cutting them down. The 
hardest work was digging the trenches to set 
the poles in, for they had no spades nor 
shovels. However, they made wooden shov- 
els and sharpened poles and after a week of 
hard work their fort was completed. It was 


THE CAMP NEAR RIM ROCK 233 


large enough for a tepee, and in one corner 
they had built a shed for their horses where 
the animals could stand and lie under a roof 
of brush and grass. More protection they 
did not need, for they were accustomed to 
sleep in the open all winter. 

Through the corner opposite the horse-shed 
ran a small stream. 

‘‘It is a good fort,’’ remarked Wahita. 
“We are very safe now, for Indians are all 
afraid of forts. They will not go very near 
and never try to climb over the posts. If 
they do not catch us away from the fort we 
are very safe.” 

The next morning, Wahita climbed to the 
top of a tall pine and for an hour spied care- 
fully over the country for miles around. 

When he came down he told his friends that 
he had looked many miles down-stream and 
that he had seen no tepees and no smoke and 
that there were no Indians in the country. 

“We should now hunt and make enough 
dried meat so we shall not starve in winter,” 
he advised, “when game may be scarce.” 


234 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


For about two weeks all three of them 
stalked buffalo, elk, and antelope. But every 
morning, before they went out to kiU game 
or smoke meat, Wahita climbed the tall pine. 

‘‘We must not be caught,’’ he said, “like 
the fool hunters. If I can see Indians, we 
must not shoot nor build fires.” 

At the end of two weeks the hunters de- 
cided that they had plenty of meat and they 
had also made a small stack of hay to feed to 
their horses, in case, on account of Indians, 
or for other reasons, they should wish to keep 
their horses in the palisade. 

For a week they took life easy. They 
mended their clothing, blankets, and saddles, 
put a few finishing touches on the stockade, 
cut some wood, looked over their guns and 
few traps, and attended to other little things 
to make their camp comfortable. 

One evening Wahita told about a method 
used by the Blackfeet to catch eagles, and 
Steve was so much interested in this plan that 
he begged his Indian friend to help him catch 
an eagle. 


THE CAMP NEAR RIM ROCK 235 


Wahita was not mncli inclined to try the 
plan. He said it was dangerous and was also 
much hard work. However, Steve was so en- 
thusiastic about it that, at last, Wahita con- 
sented and a few days later, with his white 
boy friend, rode out of the stockade equipped 
for hunting eagles. 


CHAPTER XXI 


CATCHING THE KING OF THE AIR 

T he two eagle-hunters rode a few miles 
down-stream from camp till they came 
to an open plain, from which the view 
was unobstructed to the dark, distant ridges 
of the Big Horn Mountains, and from which a 
keen eye could also follow the northeastward 
trend of the Powder River Valley for many 
miles. 

Steve had been much mystified by Wahita’s 
preparations. On the preceding afternoon 
the Indian had cut a vicious-looking wooden 
hoe out of a gnarled scrub oak, and to the 
boys’ inquiring look as to the use of this pe- 
culiar tool, had briefly remarked : 

‘ ‘ We use him for catching eagle. ’ ’ The re- 
mark only piqued Steve’s curiosity, for he 
could not conceive why a hoe should be 
needed to catch the king of birds. If they 
had gone to dig out a woodchuck, there would 
286 


THE KING OF THE AIR 237 


have been sense in taking a hoe. He wanted 
very much to ask Wahita more about the use 
of the hoe, but he had learned that the old 
Cree, when he was in the mood, delighted in 
nothing so much as in piquing the curiosity of 
his boy friend. Only a few weeks ago the old 
man had, with much display of ceremony, 
counted out a hundred service-berries and 
strung them carefully on a long horse-hair 
as if they were valuable beads. Then he had 
wound them around a peeled stick and on two 
evenings he had dried them carefully near a 
little special fire. Steve had been watching 
every act of Wahita with keen curiosity, and 
when on the second evening the old man built 
his little special fire Steve rose to the bait 
and asked what he was going to do with the 
string of berries. 

^‘Eat them, may be; dried berries are good 
to eat,’^ came the answer, while no wrinkle 
changed the face of Wahita. Steve knew 
then that the whole performance had been de- 
signed to incite his curiosity and he resolved 
not to be caught again. 


238 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


In addition to guns, knives, and axes, Wa- 
hita took the vicious-looking hoe, a crude 
wooden spade, and a sharp pole. What part 
these tools were to play in catching an eagle 
Steve could not imagine. 

Within a hundred yards of a dump of 
young yellow pine Wahita stopped and 
dropped his wooden tools. 

‘‘We catch him here!’’ he remarked. 

Steve looked about and scanned the clump 
of yellow pine. 

“Where is he?’’ he could not refrain from 
asking. 

“Far away. In the mountains ; may be in 
the clouds. He see us, may be he come, and 
we catch him. Now we dig a big hole.” 

Steve had heard of bears being caught in a 
pit, but why a big hole was needed for catch- 
ing an eagle he could not see. However, as 
Wahita started in all seriousness to dig a pit 
with hoe and spade, and sharp pole, Steve 
heartily joined in the work. 

It was late in the afternoon when Wahita 
decided that the hole was big and deep 


THE KING OF THE AIR 239 


enough. They had indeed accomplished with 
their poor tools a hard piece of work, for the 
hole was a little more than seven feet deep 
and large enough to hold a man and a hoy 
either standing or sitting. One side was dug 
slanting and was provided with a few foot- 
holes so that the hunters could get in and out. 

Steve was hungry and tired enough to go 
home, but why a pit was needed for catching 
an eagle and what was to bring the eagle he 
had not been able to figure out. 

On the following day the two hunters 
started early. ‘‘May be we catch big eagle 
to-day,” observed the Indian as he and the 
white boy rode out of the stockade. Within 
half a mile of the pit, the Indian shot a 
yearling hlacktail which he threw across his 
horse and took along to the pit, and Steve 
wondered what part the deer was to play in 
catching an eagle. 

Arrived at the pit, Wahita scattered the ex- 
cavated dirt among the sage-brush and then 
cut a number of stakes the size of strong 
tent stakes. He next partly skinned the deer. 


240 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


spread the skin over the hole, and staked it 
down firmly thus leaving the carcass attached 
to the skin stretched over the hole. Parts 
of the hole not covered by the skin of the 
deer, Wahita carefully closed with sage-brush 
and when the tools and guns had been con- 
cealed and the horses tethered on the other 
side of the pine grove, the old Cree climbed 
into the pit and with a broad grin on his dark 
leathery face invited Steve to follow him. 

‘‘We stay here,” Wahita explained, “till 
eagle comes. He flies in big rings far away. 
By and by he sees plenty meat of deer. He 
comes nearer. He sees the black and white 
talking-birds, the magpies. They eat. They 
say it is good, it is no trap. The eagle be- 
lieves it is safe, he comes down, I hear his 
big wings. By and by he sits down and be- 
gins to eat meat. I reach out, catch him by 
the legs, pull him in the hole. He is caught. 
He is mad, he fights, but I tie him up, wings, 
feet, bill. Or, maybe, I jump on his back and 
kill him, and make war-bonnet of his big 
feathers.” 


THE KING OF THE AIR 241 


At last Steve understood the whole proc- 
ess of catching an eagle and he also saw why 
Wahita had not taken the guns into the pit 
but had left them under a clump of sage- 
brush. One thing more the white boy soon 
realized, namely that Wahita ^s plan of catch- 
ing an eagle was likely to be a very long 
drawn-out and tedious game, a regular game 
of Indian patience. 

It seemed to Steve that they had been sit- 
ting for hours in perfect silence. The In- 
dian spoke not a word and there was no 
sound of either bird or beast. In fact 
Wahita seemed to have gone to sleep. 

Steve suggested that Wahita light his pipe, 
but the Indian refused, saying that the eagle 
would smell the smoke and would not come; 
and Steve could not make out whether this 
were really true. Perhaps it was one of the 
Indian superstitions of Wahita, or perhaps 
it was another one of those statements made 
with the intention of tantalizing him. He al- 
ways had to be on guard against swallowing 
some absurd story. He wished now that he 


242 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


had not gone into the pit. It would he a fear- 
ful trial of his patience if he had to sit in that 
hole all day. He was getting hungry, too, 
and he wanted very much to ask Wahita to 
let him get out and hide among the pines till 
the eagle was caught, hut he felt that the old 
man was even now inwardly chuckling at the 
impatience of the white boy, so he resolved 
to stick it out. 

At last, after an interminably long time, 
Steve thought it must be almost evening — 
two magpies alighted on the carcass. Very 
soon a few more arrived and all began a 
noisy, chattering talk. Some magpies flew 
away and others came until Steve thought 
they would eat up the deer before an eagle 
ever saw it. Then all the magpies flew away. 
Again there was a silence for a long time, and 
Steve again began to wish that he had stayed 
under the pines. This was certainly the big- 
gest fool way of catching an eagle. Why 
didn’t they lie down under the sage-brush 
and then shoot him when he came to the 
meat! That would have been the way Steve 


THE KING OF THE AIE 243 


and his father would have tried to get an 
eagle. Perhaps it was all a put-up game like 
that one with the service-berries and the 
horsehairs, only a bigger one. 

But now the old riddle-faced Indian began 
to wake up. He actually stood up and lis- 
tened and for the first time all day, his face 
showed that he was really alive. He laid 
his ears close to the wall. Steve did the 
same. Both heard a kind of dull, thump, 
thump, as if several Indians were approach- 
ing. 

Queer noise for an eagle to make,’’ Steve 
was just saying to himself, when the old Cree 
grabbed him and almost shoved him out of 
the hole. 

‘‘Grizzly bear!” he whispered. “Eun, 
run, climb up tree!” 

Steve and Wahita fairly shot out of their 
eagle pit, just before the grizzly almost tum- 
bled into it. For a moment the great gray 
king of the plains and foothills was surprised 
both at the pit and the two men that bolted 
out of it, then the king’s surprise quickly 


244 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


changed to anger and rage, for in those days 
the grizzlies feared neither man nor beast. 
He gave chase to those two bolting creatures. 
One of them, Wahita, picked up his gun and 
fired at the king, slightly wounding him and 
increasing his rage. After firing the Indian 
dropped his gun and ran, the bear after him. 
Steve was already safe among the branches of 
a young pine. Wahita had no time to select a 
good tree. He started to shin up the first one 
he reached. The grizzly was there only a few 
seconds behind. With his big right paw 
he reached up for his enemy, but Wahita, in 
spite of his sixty years, had developed almost 
as much nimbleness of legs and arms as Steve, 
and the big grizzly only brought down Wa- 
hita ’s right leggin and moccasin. These he 
at once, amid horrible growls and whoofs, 
tore into shreds, while Wahita shouted some- 
thing to him which Steve could not under- 
stand, but which did not sound like blessings 
and good wishes. 

After a while the grizzly seemed to forget 


THE KING OF THE AIR 245 


that he had two men safely treed, for he went 
and pulled the deer carcass off the pit and 
dragged it into a dry run, where Steve and 
Wahita could no longer see him. 

“What did you say to himT’ asked Steve, 
when the two eagle hunters had slid down 
from their safe perch. 

“I talked Blackfeet to him,’’ replied Wa- 
hita, “for he is a Blackfeet bear and does not 
understand Cree or English. I told him he 
was a thief and a coward for trying to kill 
us in a pit and pull us out of a tree. I told 
him I would kill him for tearing up my leg- 
gin and moccasin.” 

Thus ended the first eagle-hunt of Steve 
and his Cree guardian. They picked up their 
guns and started for camp. They did not 
try to follow the grizzly. “He is a mad 
one,” said Wahita, “and would attack us 
again. Let him go for to-day.” 

Moreover, it was almost evening now and 
Steve was ravenously hungry. Wahita 
never took along anything to eat. He never 


246 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


seemed to be hungry, but be could always 
eat a big meal whenever there was anything 
to eat. 

‘ ‘ That is because he is an Indian, ’ ^ McLean 
had explained to Steve. “He has lived that 
way since he was a boy; like the four-footed 
hunters, that eat whenever they can kill 
game/’ 


CHAPTER XXII 


GETTING HOMESICK 

I N the evening after Wahita had eaten 
his fill of meat and lit his pipe of kin- 
nikinnick mixed with a little tobacco, 
the old man became talkative. 

He explained that they would have to catch 
the big grizzly before they could think of 
catching an eagle. 

“The bear would come to our pit again, 
he said, ‘ ‘ and the next time we might not get 
away and he would kill us, or hurt us so much 
that we would be sick a long time. ’ ’ 

“Why don’t you take your gun into the pit 
and kill him if he came again?” McLean 
asked. 

“You can seldom kill a grizzly with one 
shot,” the Indian replied, “unless you shoot 
him through the head ; and you have no time 
to take careful aim. This big old bear is not 
afraid of man and he will attack us if he can, 
247 


248 IN THE GEEAT WILD NORTH 


so we must catch him before we try to catch 
an eagle.’’ 

The next day the three men built two dead- 
falls not far from the eagle-pit and they 
baited them with the parts of the deer the 
bear had left; Wahita dragged the meat to 
the deadfalls after his pony. 

‘.‘The big bear,” he told his friends, “will 
smell the trail and find the deadfalls. ’ ’ 

Three days later they found the big beast 
in one of the traps. The heavy drop log had 
broken his back and the king had died with- 
out any struggle. 

Wahita gave a shout when he found his 
quarry and exclaimed: “Now we go and 
catch the eagle ! ’ ’ 

This time, however, the Indian killed three 
coyotes and fastened their skins and carcasses 
over the pit just as he had done with the deer. 

“Coyote is better for catching eagles,” he 
explained. “Bears do not like coyote meat 
but they like deer meat. If we killed a deer, 
another bear might come and make us run 
and climb trees.” 


GETTING HOMESICK 


249 


Steve would have preferred to let Wahita 
catch the eagle alone, hut he knew his Indian 
father would laugh at him and make fun of 
him if he did not see the game through. 

So the two eagle-hunters slipped into the 
pit very early before daylight. 

‘^The eagle, may be, sits far away on a tree 
or on a rock,’’ Wahita taught his white son. 
‘‘We do not see him, hut he sees us. He sees 
everything many, many miles around. If he 
sees us go into the pit he remembers it and 
will not come, even if the magpies come and 
say it is safe.” 

All day long the two friends sat and stood 
in the pit. The magpies came and chattered 
and laughed and picked at the meat, hut no 
eagle was heard or seen. In the evening 
McLean, who had a big kettle full of meat and 
berries ready for supper, laughed at the dis- 
appointed hunters. Steve was much dis- 
gusted and would have liked to give up the 
whole plan, but Wahita only smiled and re- 
marked : 

“May be we catch him to-morrow.” 


250 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


On the next day their patience was again 
tried for hours. Then both heard a sharp 
scream far overhead and Wahita at once be- 
came alert and whispered : ‘ ‘ He is coming. ’ ’ 
Half an hour later there was a flapping and 
rushing of great wings and the eagle alighted 
on the carcasses. As the stretched skins 
yielded like a spring under the impact of the 
bird^s weight, the big eagle became suspicious 
and flapped his wings as if he would rise 
again. But quick as an arrow Wahita ’s long 
arm shot out. The eagle was firmly grasped 
by one foot and was pulled down into the pit. 
Before the big bird knew what was happen- 
ing to him, Wahita had hold of the other foot, 
while Steve grabbed him by the neck right 
behind the head so he could not strike his 
formidable hooked bill into his captors. ' For 
a few seconds, however, the captive eagle 
struck powerful blows with his big wings, but 
he was quickly turned on his back and made 
helpless. Wahita tied his terrible talons 
with thongs of rawhide and Steve’s hand- 
kerchief was used to muffle his black hooked 



The eagle was firmly grasped by one foot. — Page 250. 




GETTING HOMESICK 


251 


beak. With a broad strip of rawhide the 
powerful wings were securely tied to his back 
and the king of the air was a helpless captive. 
Steve executed an impromptu war dance 
around the pit and the captured king was 
taken in triumph to the palisade, but both 
Wahita and Steve had several blue marks on 
their faces where the fighting eagle had 
struck them with the hard elbow- joint of his 
wings. 

For a week they kept the captured king of 
the air in the palisade. After a few days he 
began to eat fresh meat they gave him, but 
he was savage and would allow no one to ap- 
proach him. Wahita wanted to kill him, but 
Steve pleaded eloquently for the great bird^s 
life and liberty. 

‘‘Let him go,’’ he argued. “Perhaps he 
has young for which he must catch sage- 
hens and fawns.” 

“No,” replied Wahita, “the young are big 
now. They can catch sage-hens themselves. 
I want to make a war-bonnet out of his feath- 
ers for my boy and myself.” 


252 IN THE GKEAT WILD NOETH 


At last the two white men persuaded their 
friend to let the eagle go after they had 
clipped two fine black quills out of each of his 
wings. This, Wahita had told them, would 
not hurt him and would not intefere with his 
flying. In later years Steve and his father 
told many times the story connected with the 
two big eagle quills on the wall of their 
cabin. 

When the eagle had been let out of the 
palisade, he ran a few steps with flapping 
wings and rose heavily from the ground. 
It seemed hard work for him to reach the 
height of the pines, but when he had cleared 
the tree tops he spread his great wings like 
black sails to the breeze and began to soar 
skyward in grand sweeping spirals. At the 
height of five hundred feet he began sailing 
toward the mountains on motionless wings. 
The three men stood and watched him, glad 
that they had given him back the freedom of 
the air. The great wings grew smaller and 
smaller as he drifted westward, and in less 
than half an hour the giant bird vanished 


GETTING HOMESICK 


253 


as a black spot against the white clouds, and 
even the keen eyes of Wahita could see him 
no more. 

Soon after the adventure with the eagle 
and the grizzly bear, the three friends made a 
scouting trip down stream to discover, if pos- 
sible, the whereabouts of the Blackfeet. But 
their trip disclosed only the most disheart- 
ening state of things. The whole Blackfeet 
nation seemed to be camping and hunting in 
the region of the junction of the Yellowstone 
and Powder Kivers. In fact the three scouts 
had a narrow escape from being discovered 
by a party of Blackfeet hunters. Only by 
hiding their horses in a thicket and twisting 
the bridle ropes around their mouths did they 
keep them from neighing and betraying their 
presence to the dreaded Blackfeet. McLean 
was very much disturbed by this discovery 
and the narrow escape of the party. 

‘^Sooner or later they are going to dis- 
cover us and lift our scalps,’’ he asserted. 
‘Ht is only a question of time about our cap- 


254 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


ture and death. We ought to get away from 
this place. Why not strike out south along 
the foothills of the mountains till we reach the 
headwaters of the Platte or the Arkansas 
River? We would, at least, get away from 
the dangerous neighborhood of the Black- 
feet.’’ 

Wahita agreed that their camp was in a 
dangerous place. ‘‘But,” he argued, “all 
Indian country is dangerous and all Indian 
life is dangerous. Blackfeet are dangerous, 
Mandans and Crows, and Sioux, all are dan- 
gerous to strangers. 

‘ ‘ Bears may kill you, panther is dangerous, 
mad buffalo and elk are dangerous, rivers are 
dangerous, had storm may kill you. But In- 
dian is careful, he watches, he fights and, 
may he, he does not get killed, but dies in his 
tepee when he is very old and when he has 
met many dangers. His children cry when 
they bury him, and they burn his tepee and 
leave food on his grave. It is all the same. 
When a man has lived long enough Manitou 
sends somebody to set his spirit free. It may 


GETTING HOMESICK 


255 


be an enemy, or a bear, or a storm. But it 
is all the same, we die when Manitou says we 
have lived long enough.’’ 

At first McLean felt provoked at this phi- 
losophy of life, but the old man spoke every 
word with so much solemn earnestness, that 
McLean was disarmed and could make no 
angry reply. 

only mean to say,” he answered, in a 
very friendly manner, ‘‘that I begin to feel 
like the man, whose story is told in an old 
book of the white people. His name was 
Ulysses. He joined a big war-party and was 
separated from his friends and was ship- 
wrecked on the big sea and was cast up on a 
strange island and wandered through many 
strange lands. When he reached home after 
many years his son did not know him and 
his wife did not know him, only his old dog 
and an aged servant had not forgotten him.” 

Wahita looked puzzled. “Is the white 
man’s country so big and is it wild I I 
thought it was small and it was all gardens 
as on Red River.” 


256 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


‘ Ht is very big, but it is not wild now. But 
a long time ago much of it was as wild as the 
countries of the Indians. This story is about 
something that happened three thousand 
years ago. ^ ^ 

‘^That is very, very long ago. It must 
have happened before Manitou made the In- 
dians and the beavers.’’ 

‘‘Steve and I wish to get back to our own 
people and our own country,” McLean con- 
tinued. “We are very homesick. We wish 
to go to the big camp of St. Louis and make 
a field and a garden and build a cabin. ’ ’ 

“The boy is not homesick,” Wahita replied 
with a laugh. 

“No,” admitted McLean, “he is not. He 
is at home wherever you and I are. ’ ’ 

“You are right about going home,” the 
Indian continued. “But we cannot go now. 
Winter is coming and traveling is too dan- 
gerous. When spring comes again, we shall 
travel along the foothills and find a river that 
will take you to the big fort of St. Louis.” 


CHAPTEE XXIII 


STALKED BY A PANTHEB 


FTEE Steve’s experience with the 



grizzly bear and the eagle, life in the 


palisade assumed for a while a rou- 


tine aspect. 

Wahita had made a bow and some steel- 
tipped arrows for the party, and with these 
primitive weapons they did most of their 
hunting in order to save their ammunition, 
which began to run low and which they could 
not replenish until they met some white trader. 
The steel arrow-heads Wahita had brought 
from Eed Eiver, for even in those days many 
Indian tribes had given up making stone 
arrow-heads, preferring to buy the steel 
points furnished by all Indian traders. 

By this time McLean had made up his mind 
to reach St. Louis as soon as possible, be- 
cause he felt that staying in this region any 
longer would only increase the danger to 


257 


258 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


which the three lone hunters were constantly 
exposed. Wahita’s and Stevens experience 
with the grizzly had strengthened this feel- 
ing, and the fear grew on him that some day 
one or all of them would be surprised and cut 
off by the Blackfeet. 

They had scarcely thirty rounds of am- 
munition for each gun, which was a small 
amount to depend on for perhaps six months, 
and all their equipment was wearing out. 
Their clothing, moccasins, blankets, and sad- 
dles all showed the effects of rough usage. 
Their hair had not been cut since they had 
left Eed Eiver and all three began to look 
more and more like real wild men of the 
forest. 

Their food, too, was exclusively of the kind 
on which savage hunters are compelled to 
subsist. They had had no salt since the big 
buffalo run near the Yellowstone, and they 
had now lived for months on nothing but 
meat, seasoned and varied occasionally by 
such wild berries as they could gather. 

Their compass had been smashed on one 


STALKED BY A PANTHEE 259 


of tlie wild buffalo runs on the plains, and 
their only guides in travel were the sun by 
day and the stars by night. Wahita, through 
the experience of a long life, had developed 
a kind of instinct for direction. Deer, elk, or 
bear might lead him any zigzag course over 
hills and rivers, through open forests and 
thickets, but when the hunt was ended, he 
stretched out his long arm and called out, 
“Our camp is there!’’ Steve and his father 
had to be much more careful, but they learned 
to guide themselves by the direction of the 
hills and the course of the rivers, and while 
they were often lost for an hour or two, they 
always found their way back to camp with- 
out great difficulty. 

Wahita took all these hardships as a mat- 
ter of course, but McLean had had enough of 
the hard life of the wilderness. If the old In- 
dian had been willing, he would have started 
toward St. Louis as soon as they felt sure 
that their return to Eed Eiver was cut off. 

But to such a plan Wahita would not lis- 
ten. 


260 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


‘‘We must not travel over the plains and 
across the rivers in winter,’’ said he. “Bad 
storms may catch us, and when the snow lies 
on the ground the Indians can trail us too 
easily. N o, we stay here till spring. ’ ’ 

So they put in the time as best they could. 
They hunted some every week, they put their 
equipment into the best possible shape, they 
improvised shooting-matches with bows and 
arrows until both Steve and his father be- 
came quite proficient in archery, and they 
slept as much as nature would permit. 

Toward spring an incident occurred which 
made McLean desire more than ever to get 
away, because it showed him once more that 
he might any day lose his only child in one 
of those unavoidable accidents and dangers 
that lurk ever in the path of the lone hunter. 
The incident even impressed care-free and 
light-hearted Steve with the sense of con- 
stantly threatening danger. 

About the middle of the afternoon Steve 
had sauntered away from camp and had 
struck the trail of a fine black-tail buck. 


STALKED BY A PANTHER 261 


Again and again he came within sight of the 
animal, accompanied by several does and 
yearlings. Three times Steve stalked the 
buck in regular Indian fashion as he had 
learned from Wahita. But a twig snapped, 
a stone started rolling or he brushed against 
some bush so that the deer took alarm and 
kept out of reach. At last he was able to 
send an arrow into one of the yearlings. 
However, the wounded animal did not fall, 
but the whole bunch ran across a ridge and 
disappeared in the timber a mile away. 

Steve followed slowly, expecting to find his 
game either dead or lying down, and in the 
latter case, he expected to kill it with another 
shot. But the deer got his wind and traveled 
across an open space into another piece of 
timber. 

When Steve reached this second piece of 
timber, daylight began to fade, and as the 
evening was cloudy, Steve knew that he would 
have a hard time finding camp. The evening 
was warm, and he decided to spend the night 
out and look for his game in the morning. 


262 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


He had stayed out several nights during the 
spring and knew that his father and Wahita 
would not be alarmed at his not returning to 
camp. Not having intended to stay out over 
night he had not taken steel and tinder with 
him, and was therefore not able to make a 
fire. However, as the night was warm, he 
selected a bed on the soft dry needles of some 
young pines and being very tired after his 
long stalk, he soon fell asleep. He had by 
this time acquired some of the characteristics 
of the Indian hunters, who, like the wild crea- 
tures they hunt, sleep lightly, especially in an 
open camp. 

Something, he did not know what, caused 
him to wake up. He sat up and listened. 
Something was slowly stalking in the thicket 
a few rods away, evidently following his trail. 
Steve got his bow ready and felt for his hunt- 
ing-knife. What could it be? Was it pos- 
sible that the Blackfeet had discovered him 
and were now trying to fall upon him? No 
Blackfeet had been seen in the foothill coun- 
try all winter, although the three lone hunters 


STALKED BY A PANTHEE 263 


had kept a sharp lookout for them every day. 
However, this might be the time when the 
long-expected blow would fall. Stevens heart 
beat fast, but he was not afraid. He felt sure 
that he could see an approaching enemy be- 
fore the enemy could see him. He would 
send an arrow into any Blackfoot that tried 
to get his scalp and then he would quietly 
creep farther back into the thicket. 

He listened with all his senses wide awake. 
Now the stealthy enemy was quiet, now he 
was moving again. He was approaching. 
Steve sat up on his knees to be able to put 
more drive behind his arrow. 

All at once a terrible scream rang through 
the forest which made Stevens blood run cold 
and almost caused him to drop his bow. The 
thought flashed through his mind that he was 
surrounded by a dozen howling Blackfeet. 
But quickly a second fiendish scream followed 
the first, and Steve knew that a panther or 
mountain lion was stalking him. 

He almost wished that it had been Black- 
feet instead of this uncanny big cat. He 


264 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


listened again, while his heart almost stopped 
beating. Would the beast really attack him? 
Wahita had said they very seldom did. The 
creature was slowly circling around him. He 
might send an arrow toward it, but he could 
not hope to kill it with an arrow, even if he 
should hit it; and wounding the beast would 
only enrage it and might cause it to attack. 

But the horrible beast was slowly coming 
closer as it circled around Steve’s bed. The 
boy tried to pierce the darkness, but it was 
impossible to catch a glimpse of the beast on 
account of the cloudy night and the cover of 
the trees, and so cautiously and cat-like did 
the animal move that only now and then a 
slight noise betrayed that the beast of terrible 
claws and teeth was still stalking the fright- 
ened hoy. A frisky little red squirrel would 
have made much more noise than the big 
prowling panther. 

Never did Steve wish so much that he could 
build a fire. With a fire he would have felt 
safe, for every wild beast fears the mystery 
of fire. 


STALKED BY A PANTHEE 265 


At last the strain became too great for the 
lad to sit still and listen any longer. He did 
not dare break away and run, for that, he 
feared, would surely induce the panther to 
spring upon him; moreover, it was too dark 
to run. There was only one thing to do. He 
rose to his feet, reached carefully up the bole 
of the tree and with a few vigorous exertions 
he pulled himself up among the branches. 

He stopped to breathe and listen. Now 
the big, lank cat could, at least, not suddenly 
spring upon him out of the darkness. But it 
was still there. He fancied that he could 
hear the switching of its long tail, and he 
heard plainly the faint cracking of a twig as 
the brute slowly circled around the clump of 
trees in which Steve was concealed. 

The lad was now free from the dread of an 
immediate attack, but how long, he asked him- 
self, would he have to stay perched among 
the branches? The prowling cat remained 
motionless for considerable periods and then 
it began again to move slowly and almost in 
silence around Steve’s place of concealment. 


266 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


The boy wondered if he would have to hang 
on among the branches all night. In despair 
he grasped a dry branch which broke with a 
loud snap, like the report of a pistol. He 
hurled the branch in the direction of the noc- 
turnal brute ; at the same time uttering a yell 
to the utmost of his lung power. Then he 
heard a noise as of some large animal rush- 
ing away through trees and brush, and the 
panther was gone. 

Steve waited awhile to make sure that it 
was not coming back, then he climbed down, 
for his legs and arms were beginning to ache 
and tremble with fatigue. He stretched him- 
self on the pine needles and resolved never 
again to stay away from camp during the 
night. He wondered why the panther had 
stalked him. It was not possible that he was 
impelled by hunger, for game was plentiful 
in the foothill country. 

After awhile he fell into an uneasy sleep, in 
which he fought with Blackfeet and panthers 
and other wild beasts. At the first dawn of 
day he awoke with a start, for he had been 


STALKED BY A PANTHER 267 


dreaming that he heard again the blood-cur- 
dling scream of the panther. 

When he realized that he had been dream- 
ing and that it would soon be daylight, he 
murmured: Thanks to the good Lord that 

I came through this night!’’ and as soon as it 
was light enough to travel, he started for 
camp. 


CHAPTEE XXIV 


THE LAST JOUBNEY AND THE LONGEST 


FTER Steve had told of his night 



with the panther, his father was de- 


termined to leave the camp at the 


rim rock as soon as the new grass had 
started so that their horses could find food. 

‘‘That boy will get killed in some way if 
we don’t get out of the Indian country. If it 
isn’t Indians, it will he bears or panthers or 
something else,” he said to Wahita. 

The old Indian was not so much impressed 
by the danger to which Steve had been ex- 
posed. 

“Panther would not eat hoy,” he com- 
mented, “panther is a coward, but grizzly is 
brave, he would kill boy and man, too.” 

“Why did the panther stalk him? ” asked 
McLean. 

“He wants to know,” Wahita replied, “he 


268 


LAST AND LONGEST JOUENEY 269 


just wants to know. He is — curious, as the 
white people call it. The boy’s trail was a 
new smell to him, he followed to find out who 
made the trail. Of course, boy got much 
scared.” 

A few days later Wahita came to camp with 
a story which impressed him more than 
Steve’s panther story. He had not only 
found signs of Indians, he had seen Indians. 

Two Blackfeet on horseback had been 
within half a mile of the stockade. He felt 
sure they had seen the stockade, because they 
had stopped and turned their horses on a 
spot from which the stockade was just visible 
among the yellow pines. Wahita had care- 
fully followed their tracks and had seen the 
two horsemen riding rapidly northward 
toward the region where the Blackfeet were 
hunting and camping. 

^‘We are discovered now,” he concluded 
his story. ^Hn a few days, a large war party 
will come up. They will scatter among the 
trees and will try to catch us.” 

As soon as it was dark the three friends left 


270 IN THE GEEAT WILD NOETH 


for good the camp which had afforded them 
a safe shelter for more than half a year. 

^‘We must go now,’’ Wahita had urged. 
‘ ‘ To-morrow we may be surrounded and may 
not be able to get away. ’ ’ 

All night long they rode in a southerly and 
southeasterly direction. They followed no 
special route, in fact there were no trails in 
the country except game trails, and those gen- 
erally followed the water courses. When 
morning dawned, they stopped near a small 
stream in a clump of cottonwoods. Wahita 
scanned the country around for signs of In- 
dians, but while he discovered bands of buf- 
falo, elk, deer, and antelope, he found no 
signs of Indians. The country seemed to be 
an uninhabited wilderness. 

After their horses had fed and rested a few 
hours, they continued their journey and rode 
till evening, when they camped in some small 
timber on a creek. 

While McLean and Steve tethered the 
horses, the Indian quickly built a small fire 
in a bend of the creek under a high bank. 


LAST AND LONGEST JOURNEY 271 


where the fire was not visible from a dis- 
tance, and when Steve and his father re- 
turned, Wahita had a kettleful of hot broth 
and boiled antelope meat ready for supper. 

‘‘We can sleep all night,’’ he said, when, 
after supper, he leaned against the clay bank 
smoking his very much blackened pipe. 
“We have made seventy or eighty miles and 
the Blackfeet cannot catch us.” 

“They will crawl around the stockade,” 
he continued with a chuckle, “for a day, may 
be for two. They are afraid to go near. 
Then one man says, ‘I am a brave warrior. 
I go in. ’ He goes in. He finds nothing but 
old moccasins. They all go in. They talk 
much bad talk in Blackfeet. They say, ‘We 
were fools not to come here long ago.’ They 
want to know who was there, but they can’t 
tell. We fooled them. We are too far 
away; they can’t catch us.” 

Very soon the little camp-fire was put out. 
The three horsemen wrapped themselves in 
their blankets and fell asleep after their long 
and hard ride. For an hour longer the 


272 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


horses cropped the young grass till their 
hunger was appeased, then they also lay 
down to rest. 

In the same watchful manner the three 
horsemen traveled along the foothills day 
after day, and week after week. They 
crossed many small streams and a few larger 
ones. What those streams were they did not 
know. The streams they crossed during 
the first two weeks, they felt reasonably sure, 
flowed toward the Missouri. As far as pos- 
sible they avoided exposing themselves 
against the sky-line, and when they discov- 
ered Indians or signs of Indians in the neigh- 
borhood they traveled by night. 

On one occasion they were discovered by a 
scout of a large party of what they believed 
to be Crow Indians. That evening they built 
a large false camp-fire a quarter of a mile 
from their actual camp, and as soon as their 
horses had had a little time to feed and rest, 
they stole away and traveled all night. 

After they had been journeying in this way 
for about a month, they fell in, to their great 


LAST AND LONGEST JOUENEY 273 


surprise, with a party of nine white men, 
who were preparing to trap beaver along 
the headwaters of a fairly large river. 

These trappers told that they had come 
from St. Louis to the country of the friendly 
Mandans in the present State of North 
Dakota. From there they had traveled 
across the prairie and along the foothills un- 
til they had struck this very fine beaver coun- 
try. They expected to stay here until each 
had made a fortune in beaver skins, when 
they expected to return to St. Louis. There 
had originally been seventeen men in the 
party, hut one had died of some illness, one 
had been killed by a bufiPalo, on§ had started 
after a grizzly bear and had never come back, 
and the other five had been killed by Indians. 

‘‘These men are all big fools,’’ Wahita said 
in the evening as the three friends sat at 
their own little camp-fire. “They don’t 
watch, they don’t build a fort. Some day 
the Indians will find them and steal all their 
fur and kill them. They will never get back 
to St. Louis.” 


274 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 

The trappers did not know on what river 
they were camping. Some thought it was the 
Platte, others believed it to be the Arkansas, 
some thought it was the Red River of the 
South. 

The time had now come when Wahita 
either had to turn back toward the north or 
had to go with his white friends to St. Louis 
and then go north with some traders. The 
old man was determined to make his way 
back across the plains all alone. 

‘^The traders cannot protect me,’’ He said, 
^ ^but I can look out if I am alone. I am safer 
alone. 

‘‘You must not stay with these men,” he 
warned his friends. “They will all get 
killed. You must build a boat and go down 
this river, which will take you to the big 
river of St. Louis, because all rivers in this 
country flow into that big river which the 
white people call Mississippi. When you 
find that big river, you can easily find St. 
Louis, because some white man will tell you 
that you must travel up the river or down 


LAST AND LONGEST JOUENEY 275 


the river to go to the fort. You must not 
travel farther on the horses, because you do 
not know and I do not know and the trappers 
do not know in what direction to go to St. 
Louis. So you would he lost and go this way 
and that way and some day some bad Indians 
would capture you and kill you. ’ ^ 

With the aid of a few spikes bought, and 
an auger borrowed of the trappers, the three 
friends built a crude boat of hewn cottonwood 
boards. 

Then came a sad day of parting. With 
tears in their eyes McLean and Steve saw 
their true old friend start on the dangerous 
journey for his distant home in the big 
swamps on Hudson Bay. When the old man 
had waved them his last farewell from a 
ridge a mile away, McLean and Steve untied 
their boat and glided down-stream. They 
also had still a long and dangerous journey 
ahead of them, but they felt that their old 
faithful friend would be exposed to far 
greater dangers. 

McLean and Steve had plenty of food and 


276 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


they also carried several valuable packs of 
fur which they had bought of the trappers 
in exchange for their horses. They did most 
of their traveling by night, while during the 
daytime they rested in the seclusion of some 
willows and other bushes. Wahita had 
strongly urged this as the only safe plan. 
They often saw Indians from their hiding- 
places, but only once were they discovered by 
a party of three Indians. These three In- 
dians camped toward evening a short dis- 
tance above them. As a matter of precau- 
tion, Steve and his father lay down i,n the 
boat which was tied to the shore by a string 
of rawhide. When father and son discov- 
ered the Indians close to their camp they 
dropped down-stream another mile, but the 
redskins followed and camped a short dis- 
tance above. This maneuver they repeated 
three times. 

Then McLean and Steve were convinced 
that the reds had some evil design in mind 
which had to be met by bold action. So they 
walked, with guns ready, straight up to the 


LAST AND LONGEST JOUENEY 277 


camp of tlie reds and McLean told them by 
unmistakable signs: 

‘‘You followed us three times. If you fol- 
low us again we will shoot you!’^ 

Father and son then traveled down-stream 
the greater part of the night, but the three 
reds had understood and were not seen again. 

At the end of two weeks the two lost trav- 
elers came to a trading-post kept by a white 
man, who told them that they were on the 
Arkansas Eiver, and in two weeks more they 
reached St. Louis in safety, which ended their 
years of wandering by water and by land. 

Of the trappers, whom they had left on the 
upper Arkansas, only one ever returned to 
St. Louis. The others were cut off by In- 
dians, just as Wahita had predicted. 

McLean and Steve selected a piece of land 
on the rich black soil which lies between St. 
Louis and the small town of St. Charles, and 
soon became prosperous frontier farmers. 

Steve wrote a long letter to the cook at 
York Factory, telling about their trip and 
asking that the news be told to Wahita in 


278 IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 


case lie also had returned to his own peopla 
It took almost two years before a long let- 
ter reached St. Louis, telling that after meet- 
ing many dangers and hardships, Wahita 
had reached Red River, and was now living 
as a happy old man at Hudson Bay. 

Of the party of butfalo-hunters with whom 
Steve and his father and Wahita had started 
from Red River, only ten men had returned. 
All the others had fallen victims to their care- 
lessness. 

Wahita had an endless string of stories to 
tell, the letter said, about the wonderful time 
he had had and of the many adventures he 
met in the company of his two white friends. 

‘‘The story he enjoys most,^’ the letter 
closed, “is the one in which he tells how the 
white boy almost burst with impatience in 
the eagle-pit and how the big grizzly came 
and chased him and the hoy up a tree. ’ ’ 

Here ends the story of Steve and his 
father, and of Wahita, the Cree of the big 
swamps of the Great Wild North. 


THE END 



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